For four years, the early World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) united the labor movement of all
political types from around the globe. Also, actors from the Global South were now part of the global trade
union movement. Many of the delegates of colonized countries were aware of the usefulness of international
arenas. ...
(Show more)For four years, the early World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) united the labor movement of all
political types from around the globe. Also, actors from the Global South were now part of the global trade
union movement. Many of the delegates of colonized countries were aware of the usefulness of international
arenas. The paper will look at individual actors from the Global South, especially India, who used the
international arenas to put their demands on the global agenda settings. The focus will be on Shripad Amrit
Dange, the founding member of the Communist Party of India, who took part at the Congresses of the
WFTU in the 1940s as delegate of the All-Indian Trade Union Congress (AITUC), and who became
chairman of the General Council and Vice-president of the WFTU. This will be complemented by other
actors from South-East Asia as they spoke up in the context of anti-colonial discussions.
The article is based on source material of the WFTU Archives at the International Institute of Social History
(IISH) in Amsterdam. In addition to this material produced by the WFTU staff and to complement the
internal view with an outside, Indian perspective, the analysis uses documents of the collection of the
AITUC, which was only very recently digitized by the Archives of Indian Labour. To be able to approach
the person S. A. Dange, the paper refers to some biographical sketches on him.
The paper will demonstrate what influence the actors from colonial countries had on the debate and agenda
of the early WFTU. It will look at the discussions on the constitution of the organization, the establishment
of a Colonial Department and the planning of conferences in Dakar and Calcutta. The paper thus shows that
these actors with a colonial background were significantly involved in setting new debates and discussions in
global trade union movement and were also a driving factor in advancing these issues during the late 1940s,
most notably on the empowerment of socially marginalized groups.
Johanna Wolf is working at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am
Main since November 2019 on the project “Non-state law of the economy”. Her dissertation – awarded with
the Walter-Markov-Prize in 2017 – focused on the global challenges of metal trade unions in the shipbuilding
industry of the 1970s and 1980s (Assurances of Friendship. Transnationale Wege von Metallgewerkschaftern
in der Schiffbauindustrie, 1950–1980, Göttingen: 2018), which she completed in Global Studies at the
University of Leipzig. From 09/2020 until June/2021 she was a Research Fellow at the International Institute
of Social History in Amsterdam where she was working on the mobility of communist trade union actors
since 1945, funded by a research grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
13 Mr. S. A. Dange, in: [WFTU]. Report of the World Trade Union Conference, [...] London, February 6th to 17th,
1945. Edited by John MacIntosh, S. Ireland and Walter Citrine. London: [British Trades Union Congress], 1945,173.
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