Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade

The international labor movement has been undermined by the long-running obsession the leadership of America’s largest federation of unions, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), has had with combatting communism abroad, according to this ambitious debut. Drawing on his own and others’ recent archival discoveries, historian Schuhrke demonstrates that 20th-century American political and union leaders shared a “calculus” in which “brutal, corrupt, right-wing dictators were preferential to leftists.” This was not only an ideological alignment but a material one—the AFL-CIO worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, Schuhrke asserts, engaging in both overt and covert interventionist tactics, ranging from calling general strikes in aid of right-wing coups to funneling CIA funds to “noncommunist left” partners abroad. He marshals a persuasive cache of evidence to this effect, including one U.S. union leader who, upon taking control of his organization, was perplexed to discover “a mysterious group of men... working out of the building’s fourth floor in the ‘International Relations Department.’ ” Schuhrke traces a late-20th-century shift as rank-and-file workers began to oppose their unions’ interventionism in Central America, but he also contends that American unions’ interventionist activity persisted into the 21st century, citing events in Venezuela. Schuhrke is heavy on names, dates, and places while somewhat short on context, offering potentially too few footholds for readers new to the subject. But once the big picture comes into focus, this exhilarates. (Sept.)