Unions and Cold War Foreign Policy in the 1980s: The National Labor Committee, the AFL-CIO, and Central America
2002; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-7709.00318
ISSN1467-7709
Autores Tópico(s)Communism, Protests, Social Movements
ResumoThe relationship of American labor to the Cold War, both at home and abroad, has long engaged the attention of historians. A common refrain of many studies is that organized labor embraced the Cold War consensus, leading the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to expel eleven communist-led or "left" unions in 1949–50 and to join the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in support of the anticommunist foreign policy of the United States. This was certainly a significant development, and few American institutions proved as resolute in support of the Cold War as the merged AFL-CIO. Yet this was hardly a development unique to American unions, since noncommunist (including socialist) labor movements throughout Western Europe also supported the Cold War foreign policies of their respective states. Moreover, labor's integration into the Cold War consensus was not a uniform or immutable development. There were differences between the versions of anticommunist foreign policy advocated by AFL and CIO unions, both before and after their 1955 merger. Further, segments of organized labor did dissent from the Vietnam War and question its Cold War justifications, notwithstanding the indelible image of hard hats pummeling youthful protesters. Finally, when the Reagan administration sought to overcome the "Vietnam syndrome" and revive Cold War interventionism in Central America, an important group of U.S. unions quickly and forcefully opposed the policy and its Cold War premises, even as the AFL-CIO largely supported the administration's efforts in the region.1
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