Resistance in Okinawa

During the Indochina war, US bases on the island of Okinawa were used by the US military to store nuclear weapons and to launch B-52 strikes on Vietnam. This infuriated the citizens of Okinawa as well as many Japanese, sparking the political unrest that culminated in the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control. But in 1967 and again in 1969, labor tensions in Okinawa boiled over, first after a military base workers' union known as Zengunro called a general strike to protest Okinawa's role in the war, and then when a new labor code imposed by Washington banned strikes on US bases and threatened strikers with severe punishment. The AFL-CIO became directly involved in stifling Okinawan resistance.

In April 1967 F.T. Unger, the US Army's High Commissioner in Okinawa, wrote a letter to Meany informing him that Zengunro "has veered considerably" toward the "opposition reversion movement." He asked Meany to send an AFL-CIO staffer to Okinawa because "the Zengunro leadership needs a firm yet reassuring hand to protect them from the hotheads." A year later, Meany's representative in Okinawa warned his boss of the dangers to US interests presented by the election of a prominent leader of the reversion movement--who was also a member of the local teachers' union--as Okinawa's first chief executive. Japanese leftists, he complained, were calling the election "a mandate for immediate unconditional reversion, removal of all US military bases and ultimate abrogation of the Japanese-US Mutual Security Treaty in 1970"--developments anathema to the AFL-CIO.

The general strike in February 1969 infuriated Meany and his staff, particularly because it was endorsed by Domei, the conservative Japanese labor federation aligned with the AFL-CIO. In a memo to Meany, his international affairs director, Ernest Lee, warned that the strike was "primarily against the US government authority on the island as well as US foreign policy" and "could affect our Vietnamese effort and support a communist offensive in Vietnam." Lee became livid when he learned that Victor Reuther, international affairs director of the UAW and one of the few labor leaders who challenged AFL-CIO foreign policy, was openly backing the Okinawa base workers. Reuther's telegram of support to Okinawa, Lee told his boss, "is one of the encouragements upon which [Japanese trade unionists] will lean" during the strike. He added, "I believe that both State and Defense should be aware of that cable." Turning in one of the country's most respected labor leaders to the Pentagon surely ranks as a low point in AFL-CIO history.

Venezuela and Beyond

Since taking control of the AFL-CIO's international programs in 1996, Shailor and her deputy for Latin America, Stan Gacek, have worked hard to transform relations with unions around the world. Last fall, Sweeney and Arturo Martinez, the president of Chile's CUT, signed a declaration urging their governments to include "enforceable obligations" on workers' rights in any free-trade agreement and rejecting the imposition of Chile's privatized social security system "on the workers of the United States." (Ironically, that pact is now threatened by US anger at Chile's refusal to vote with Bush during the UN debate on Iraq.) And a delegation of organizing directors from three US unions recently used ACILS funds to visit South Korea, where they exchanged ideas with their counterparts in the KCTU. Solidarity, in other words, has now replaced intervention as the cornerstone of labor's foreign policy.

The AFL-CIO's overseas work, however, retains close government ties. ACILS obtains most of its $18-million-a-year budget from AID and the Congressionally funded NED, with some additional funds from private foundations. AID just concluded a five-year grant to ACILS of $60 million and will provide another $9 million a year for the next five years. ACILS currently has programs in twenty-eight countries, where, according to Tim Beaty, deputy director of international affairs, staffers work with overseas trade unionists "to build a better labor movement" by linking unions within the same industry and building coalitions with social movements. (The day of our interview, Beaty was coordinating meetings between US unions and a delegation of environmental activists from Taiwan trying to win compensation from RCA for the pollution it caused there before pulling out in 1992.) Proof of the AFL-CIO's independence from the government, Gacek told me, "is in the application. Can we basically follow an agenda that is not tied to any geopolitical interest other than international trade union solidarity? Without making any comments about the past, I think yes, that is something we are doing now."

But the AFL-CIO's experience with Venezuela's CTV illustrates how the line between geopolitics and solidarity can get blurred. The AFL-CIO's relationship with the CTV goes back to the 1970s, when Venezuelan unions, through their alliance with the Democratic Action Party, were for many years part of the center-right government. The archives show that the AFL-CIO and the CTV worked closely in those years to isolate Cuba and counter the influence of left-wing unions in Latin America. The labor federations were used by the US and Venezuelan governments as unofficial channels on oil. In a 1974 meeting with the CTV, for example, the AFL-CIO pointed out that "the oil pricing arrangement of OPEC and of Venezuela are wrecking the economic balance of the free world." The CTV assured Meany "that Venezuela is a secure source of supply for the United States. We are not the Middle East. We are similar people. We dress the same. We have the same unions. We have the same capitalists and the same military. When you talk with us it is not a conversation between Kissinger and the shieks [sic] but between brother trade unionists."

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