Members of Jobs with Justice, Mexico's FAT union and UE with UE International Affairs Director Robin Alexander

Linking with foreign workers:
a brief history

A hundred years ago the U.S. labor movement had a vision of international solidarity. The Wobblies - whose real name was the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW - believed that we were engaged in a common struggle without boundaries. For example, between 1900 and 1920 the IWW recruited Mexicans working in mines, on the railroads, in construction, and in agricultural in the United States into their organizations, some of whom organized IWW locals upon their return to Mexico. IWW members from the US also traveled south, organizing IWW locals in the Mexican mines where they worked, among sailors, stevedores in the port of Veracruz, and later among Mexican oil field and refinery workers.

Even Samuel Gompers, the much more conservative head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) wrote "There is an ideal that has been the scope of liberty-loving men and women of all ages and the labor movements of all countries --internationalism. . ."

A few decades later, in the Fall of 1945, this dream was realized with the founding of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) - a truly international organization of trade unions, which included the CIO from the United States together with unions from the Soviet Union, Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

So what happened? What happened first was the cold war. And internationally the labor movement split on ideological lines between the capitalist (ICFTU), communist (WFTIT) and a smaller Christian federation (the World Confederation of Labor). These all have regional bodies, as well as sectoral bodies, called international trade secretariats or ITS's.

The AFL-CIO was (and remains) a major player within the ICFTU and during this period, in return for government funding, it began doing the dirtiest work of the State Department. In Latin America, the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), staffed in part by the CIA, subverted the real labor movements in Latin America, in some cases establishing opposing unions in order to support dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua, Duvalier in Haiti and Pinochet in Chile, and to oppose progressive leaders such as Arbenz in Guatemala and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Within this framework, the AFL-CIO's partner in Mexico was the CTM, which had serious implications for relationships between unions in our countries more recently during the debate over NAFTA. (The speech by Amy Newell which is also included in your materials has more information about this point). Since the CTM was tied to the ruling party in Mexico, it was a strong supporter of NAFTA, causing many workers within the AFL-CIO's affiliated unions to seriously question its international alliances and policies.

The election of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson in 1995 to the leadership of the AFL-CIO resulted in some very significant reforms. For the first time in decades, the AFL-CIO began to replace the cold warriors and spies who conducted their international affairs with younger people who had a different approach to international solidarity.

The end of the cold war also resulted in political changes within the international federations and ITS's, which began to focus much more on questions of corporate globalization, and in many cases the ITS's began to form World Councils of unions within particular transnationals.

At the same time, the political re-structuring of Europe resulted in a requirement that every company in the European Union which employs more than 1000 workers within the EU and has over 150 workers in at least two member countries must establish a European Works Council or EWC. These are composed of representatives of both labor and management and their utility varies widely depending on the degree of corporate domination. Nevertheless, they give participating unions access to far more company information than we have here in the United States, and some of the works councils are excellent.

Although the UE has historically been unaffiliated, a number of years ago, we looked into the possibility of affiliation and in 1997 joined the ICEM, the most progressive and active of the ITS's.