The American Federation of Labor’s Cold War Campaign against “Slave Labor” at the United Nations

Abstract

In 1951, the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) sponsored the publication of a glossy, six-inch, square pamphlet, Slave Labor in the Soviet World, in which the labor organization outlined its case against forced labor in the Soviet GULAGs. The authors presented their argument in dramatic red and black inks, accompanied by stark black-and-white sketches of Soviet prison life, artfully “decorated” by blood-red barbed wire. Two-thirds of each two-page spread of the pamphlet sported reproductions of the actual pieces of evidence collected to prove the charges, with the remaining third providing translations of the Russian, formatted to look exactly like the Soviet documents. On the last page of the Slave Labor report, the FTUC concluded with a notice printed in brilliant red ink:

Only a small sampling of the total evidence can be reproduced here—enough, however, to reveal the truth. These bare documents, statistics, and affidavits are not addressed to scholars alone. They are addressed to the conscience of the free world. This time the world must believe.¹