Abstract
Why is it that trade unions adhere to the foreign policy of their country or administration? Different explanations have been provided. Unions sought to achieve their objectives in this way, realizing that taking a purely national approach would not prove successful. Or they offered their services to the government for the sake of immediate or future benefits (or hoped-for benefits), a kind of bargain. Or unions or union leaders sought to strengthen their position domestically.1
This contribution aims to find out what lies at the root of American trade union activism. It wants to examine how its practices and tools have been shaped and especially why the American trade union movement was so actively involved with faraway countries and issues in which it should have but the remotest of interest at first sight.
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Notes
John Logue, Toward a Theory of Trade Union Internationalism (Göteburg, Sweden: University of Göteburg, 1980); Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten, “Spionage Für Mitbestimmung: Die Kooperation der Internationalen Transportarbeiterföderation mit alliierten secret Services im Zweiten Weltkrieg als Korporatistische Tauscharrangement,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 33 (1997);
Geert Van Goethem, The Amsterdam International. The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006);
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Marjorie Nicholson, The TUC Overseas: The Roots of Policy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
On the history of the IFTU’s forerunner, see Susan Milner, The Dilemmas of Internationalism, French Syndicalism and the International Labor Movement, 1900–1914 (Oxford: Berg, 1990).
Gary Busch, The Political Role of International Trade Unions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 33.
John Windmuller, American Labor and the International Labor Movement, 1940 to 1953 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1954).
Simeon Larson, Labor and Foreign Policy: Gompers, the AFI and the First World War, 1914–1918 (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 28.
Elisabeth McKillan, “Integrating Labor into the Narrative of Wilsonian Internationalism: A Literature Review,” Diplomatic History 34 (2010): 641–643.
C. W. Toth, Bulwark for Freedom: Samuel Gompers’ Pan American Federation of Labor (San Juan, PR: Inter American University Press, 1979).
Frederico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944–1951. Trans. Harvey Fergusson, II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 12–14.
Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999).
Walter Citrine, My American Diary (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1941), 351.
Harold J. Seymour, Design for Giving: The Story of the National War Fund, Inc., 1943–1947 (New York: Harper, 1947), 90.
Joseph C. Goulden, Meany (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 123.
Roy Godson, “The AFL Foreign Policy Making Process From the End of World War II to the Merger,” Labor History 16 (1975): 327.
Michael Kerper, The International Ideology of U.S. Labor, 1941–1975 (Göteborg, Sweden: University of Göteborg, 1976).
Sallie Pisani, The CLO and the Marshall Plan (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 3.
Daniel Calhoun, The United Front!: The TUC and the Russians, 1923–1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 407.
Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
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© 2013 Robert Anthony Waters, Jr. and Geert van Goethem
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van Goethem, G. (2013). From Dollars to Deeds: Exploring the Sources of Active Interventionism, 1934–1945. In: Waters, R.A., van Goethem, G. (eds) American Labor’s Global Ambassadors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_2
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