American Labour's Cold War Abroad

Carew presents a lively and clear account of what has largely been an unknown dimension of the Cold War. In impressive detail, Carew maps the international programs of the American Federation of Labour–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) during the Cold War and its relations with labour organizations abroad, in addition to providing a summary of the labour situation of a dozen or more countries including Finland, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Greece, and India. American Labour’s Cold War Abroad reveals how the Cold War compelled trade unionists to reflect on the role of unions in a free society. Yet there was to be no meeting of minds on this, and at the end of the 1960s the AFL–CIO broke with the mainstream of the international labour movement to pursue its own crusade against communism.

Anthony Carew is a lifelong trade unionist and is currently an honorary visiting reader in international labour studies in the Alliance Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester. Carew began work in the Canadian labour movement where became research director of the largest railway brotherhood. Later, he was a research fellow at the University of Sussex Centre for Contemporary European Studies focusing on European trade unionism, and for twenty-six years he taught industrial relations and labour history at the University of Manchester Institute for Science and Technology. Widely published, his books include Labour Under the Marshall Plan, The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy 1900-1939 and The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, (with co-authors Dreyfus, Van Goethem, Gumbrell-McCormick, and van der Linden).