Preliminary Programme

This paper aims at contributing to the general debate about the impact of international labor organizations on national labor movements, by means of analyzing the role played by the three world labor confederations, the ICFTU, the WCL and the WFTU in a specific moment, national case and time: during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The military government that seized power on April 24, 1976 was the most repressive in Argentine history and workers, labor militants and union leaders were among the most prominent targets of this repression. At the same time, trade union activity was severely affected by the suspension of civil liberties and the military take-over of the national labor confederation (Confederación General del Trabajo, CGT) and many of the most prominent unions. Labor rights, beginning with the right to strike, were suspended, along with any form of collective organization and bargaining. Moreover, the economic policies of increasing commercial openness and financial liberalization decreased the participation of the industrial sector in the economy, promoting the establishment of a new economic model, centered on financial valorization. These economic transformations were imposed in a context of terror and control and had severe implications for the industrial working class, the core of the union movement, and its ability to organize, bargain and protest.

This paper will contend that among the many strategies to counter this offensive against labor, the international denunciation campaign played an important role, as it helped opening new spaces in the national political arena and it backed many attempts to mobilize and organize on the part of many sectors of the Argentine working class. The protests issued by the world labor confederations, with their differences in analysis and orientation, which will also be addressed, helped in achieving the release of labor leaders and in strengthening the position of labor unions that were confronting the regime. This paper will be based on a wide range of documents collected in Argentina, at the CGT Archives, the CEDINCI archive of the left-wing labor movements and the Senén González Press Archive (UTDT), as well as in many archives in Europe. The main focus of the research project in progress is on the ICFTU, for which it has been of great help the ICFTU archives at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, but it will also use, in order to analyze the role of the other world confederations, documents found at the Bibliothéque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine in Nanterre, at the archives of the French labor confederations C.F.D.T. (Confédération Francaise Démocratique du Travail) and C.G.T. (Confédération Générale du Travail), as well as at the F.S.M. Archives (Fédération Syndicale Mondiale), all of them in Paris. Other important documents came from the archives of the W.C.L. (World Confederation of Labor) in Leuven, as well as from the International Labor Organization in Geneva.
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This paper aims to analyze the role of the American trade unionism in Brazil during the Civil-Military Dictatorship. I will focus on the activities of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), funded by the U.S. government, the AFL-CIO, and U.S. employers. The analysis will point out how the Americans unionists created labor programs as a way to promote the so called “free and democratic” unionism and to combat Communism in Brazil. Accordingly, I question why the military regime, even during the high point of its alliance with the U.S. state, decided not to adopt the American contractualist labor relations system. To this end, I will analyze relations between Brazilian and American trade unions through the educational activities conduct by the AIFLD. Nevertheless, in observing the projects of the Alliance for Progress related to Brazilian unionism, I emphasize the complexity of transnational relations during the Cold War, focusing on the actions of the Brazilian government and local trade unionists. I consider these actions essential for the implementation of American trade union programs in the country. (Show less)

In May 1974, Irving Brown and Michael Boggs of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) traveled to Lisbon to attend a two-day conference of Portuguese labor unionists. Convened only three weeks after a left-wing military coup on April 25th had toppled Portugal's over four decades old dictatorial regime, the conference represented a historic break with the official corporatism and state suppression of labor organizing during the dictatorship, symbolizing the rapidity of change after the coup.
Pleased at the new prospects for independent unionism but wary of the heady atmosphere of popular revolution that surrounded the conference, the Americans contented themselves with a cordial but low-key pledge of support for Portuguese labor. After the conference, through a series of meetings with Portuguese labor leaders and politicians facilitated by the American embassy, Brown and Boggs began the work of steering Portuguese unionists away from revolutionary excitement and toward businesslike wages-and-hours bargaining. Over the next decade, the AFL-CIO worked closely with the U.S. foreign policy establishment to bolster non-Communist forces within Portuguese labor, create training programs for Portuguese labor leaders with solid non-Communist credentials, and promote an American model of non-political, trade-union-centered collective bargaining.
This paper presents a preliminary examination of the AFL-CIO's attempts to shape the Portuguese labor movement during and immediately following the Portuguese Revolution. Research on the AFL-CIO's foreign policy adventures, while it has recently experienced something of a renaissance, continues to be scarce, and there is practically no research on the organization's activities in Portugal. At the same time, the history of external influences shaping and constraining the European left has become newly relevant, not least because of current events.
The paper draws primarily on the archives of the AFL-CIO, which contain a fair amount of documentation of the organization's activities in Portugal, and supplements this with research in the standard U.S. foreign policy collections, such as the online database Declassified Documents Reference System, the Department of State's Central Foreign Policy File (U.S. National Archives, collection available online), the Foreign Relations of the United States series, and the Digital National Security Archive.
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The Great Depression of the 1930 and the defeat of the strong German and Austrian labour movements against fascism surely belong to the best researched aspects in the history of the labour movement. Most of this research is focused on the national level.
Less attention has until now been paid to the activities of the international organizations of the labour movement during that period. This is especially true for the international organizations belonging to its social-democratic mainstream, while the research on the Communist International and also the smaller oppositional tendencies is more advanced.
Based on sources from the international organizations of the labour movement, mainly the International Trade Secretariats (ITS), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the Labour and Socialist International (LSI), this paper takes a transnational view on this crucial period.
The paper deals with the possibilities and limits of international actions of the labour movement on the international level during that period. Whereas a major part of the research on the history of the labour movement has been concerned with the failure of Labour Internationalism and its divisions, this paper will focus on the actual work of these international organizations and less on the discrepancy between their aims and the more frustrating reality. Special attention will be paid to the strategies socialists and trade unionists discussed on the international level to fight against the crisis and the threat of fascism and war. (Show less)