Chilean Workers and the US Labor Movement: From Solidarity to Intervention, 1950s–1970s

Abstract

In August 1969, AFL-CIO president George Meany appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to clarify the international role of the AFL-CIO and the use of funding received from the Agency for International Development (AID).1 Responding to accusations that the AFL-CIO had received funding in exchange for supporting US foreign policy and US intervention in Vietnam, Meany argued the existence of a historical relationship among labor unions across the world and, especially, in the Americas. The AFL-CIO’s international role was justified, Meany said, by the intertwined destiny of workers around the world. “We have a stake in the freedom of workers everywhere,” he noted. “We have learned from experience that when workers in other countries lose their freedom where they are forced to submit to the yoke of a dictatorship or tyrannical government of any kind, their repression and enslavement constitute a grave threat to our own freedom. And of course, we have learned from the history of recent years that the very first to lose their freedoms are the workers.”2 In Latin America, explained Meany, their mission was to help Latin Americans “build unions which are strong, independent, representative of the workers and capable, through their own efforts, of improving the conditions of the workers, and making a contribution to the economic development of their own country.”3