[lbo-talk] Goldberg, CIA & Unionization Decline

Bob Feldman bob_jan at xensei.com
Sun Nov 23 20:57:59 PST 2003


"The CIA, like most of the Cold War bureaucracies, peaked in power and influence during the 1960s, but unionization levels didn't drop like a rock until the mid-1970s. Most of US labor's problems were internal -- things like its lack of a Southern strategy, a lack of service-sector organizing, a lack of a coherent industrial policy, a lack of commitment/connection with the social justice movements, and a leadership dominated by white, male skilled workers, unable to connect with a diverse workforce."

Reply: Actually, the CIA remained powerful after the 1960s, as evidenced by its role in orchestrating the Contra War and the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for instance. In addition, after the CIA-linked AFL-CIO union bureaucrats engineered the expulsion of the U.S. leftist activists who actually did most of the effective union organizing in the U.S. between 1930 and 1945, unionization levels began to drop --from 35.5% in 1945 to only 25% by 1975.

Regarding Arthur Goldberg's negative political role, you might be interested in checking out former Australian Labor Party member of the Victorian Parliament Joan Coxsedge's 1982 book ROOTED IN SECRECY: the clandestine element in Australian politics, which states:

"The CIA, acting as an agent of the multinational corporations, has infiltrated international labour organisations, established proprietary international labor fronts and manipulated the AFL-CIO and the free trade unnion confederation of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia...The WFTU was the major international albour organisation at the end of World War 2 and included many American unions which belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO). Arthur Goldberg, the General Counsel for the CIO, engineered the expulsion of the Left from his organisation....After the left-wing purge of the CIO, Goldberg worked to achieve union with the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) headed by rabid anti-communist and long-time CIA stooge, George Meany, and what was left of the CIO. In 1955 the two merged to become the AFL-CIO...The CIA instigated the withdrawal of the American unions and many European unions from the WFTU in 1949...By the mid-60s, the CIA developed a new mechanism for its labour operations. These new organisations, working under cover as `international affiliates' of the AFL-CIO, are totally controlled by the CIA...Budget estimates in the early 70s showed that at least $120 million per year was being spent by the CIA for labour operations alone."

While CIA conspiratorial activity alone is, obviously, not the sole reason for the continued economic enslavement of U.S. working-class people, ignoring the role that the CIA has clandestinely played in U.S. history in creating foundation-sponsored "parallel left" U.S. and foreign dissident groups that pose no real political threat to the U.S. power structure encourages belief in false academic theories about how the U.S. power elite actually has been able to continue its economic enslavement of U.S. working-class people in the 21st-century..

bob



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