AFL CIO’s Cold War Complicity | Jeff Schuhrke | TMR
October 17, 2024
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29:54Now PlayingAFL CIO’s Cold War Complicity | Jeff Schuhrke | TMR
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as posted by the channelLive-streamed on September 26, 2024
Jeff Schuhrke, assistant professor in labor studies at SUNY Empire State University, to discuss his recent book Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade.
Professor Jeff Schuhrke then joins, diving right into the history of the AFL-CIO’s internal cold war and the havoc it wreaked on the institution’s organizing capacities, stepping back to outline the start difference in organizing of the then-separate AFL and CIO during the union boom at the peak of the Great Depression in the 1930s, with the Congress of Industrial Organizations taking on a grassroots approach, organizing across the spectrum of the working class to improve class consciousness, including among the growing communist factions in the US, and thus rapidly and drastically expanding their base, unionizing massive corporations, and establishing many openly-communist-led unions, all nationwide, a strategy directly contrasted by the American Federation of Labor’s establishment and anti-communist tact of this era. Moving into the 1940s, Professor Schuhrke explores how the post-war period, between the overwhelming backlash to a wave of strikes in 1945, the growth of an anti-communist government-backed military industry, and the onset of the McCarthyist Red Scare, saw a complete inversion of the growing labor power of the last decade, with full-scale communist purges and the GOP’s takeover of Congress crippling both the numbers and the rights that had so bolstered labor, resulting in a decimated CIO limping to join the AFL in 1955. From here, Jeff walks Emma through the rapid expansion of the AFL-CIO’s anti-communist aims, as funding poured in from the State Department to sponsor an international effort by the labor federation fundamentally conflating anti-communist fear-mongering with labor organizing, be it through worker training or illegal, mafia-backed intimidation practices, putting any attempt to unify the working class to the side as labor took a back seat to US empire, with union rates reflecting exactly that. They wrap up the interview by tackling what we can learn from this period of corruption and degradation as the US finds itself amid a labor renaissance.
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