Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor's Tunnel Vision: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America
Howard, Alan
TUNNEL VISION: LABOR, THE WORLD ECONOMY, AND CENTRAL AMERICA, by Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor. Boston: South End Press. 88 pp. $5.00. Afew years back, acknowledging its losses in membership...
...Would we be better able to stem the tide of imports from countries that violate worker rights if we embraced the WFTU [World Federation of Trade Unions...
...Their critique, delivered in telling detail, is that it has been applied with an exceedingly rigid definition of just what constitutes a "free" trade union...
...This would seem to suggest a degree of influence over policy, though the federation insists there is "no hold by the government over the purposes and programs of the AFL-CIO abroad...
...It would be a great farce except for the fact that thousands of workers and labor leaders have been murdered while all this goes on, and so we are dealing here with tragedy...
...Nowhere is the triumph of ideology over reality clearer than in El Salvador and nowhere have the 382 • DISSENT results been more disastrous...
...The logic of this argument is difficult to understand...
...And that even where they are, to the extent that cooperation would benefit American workers, yes, cooperation should at least be carefully considered...
...What is difficult to understand is how Jessup could so completely miss the point of Cantor and Schor's critique...
...The tendency of deferring to the federation president on foreign policy is still powerful, but there are alarming signs that democracy may be breaking out...
...Would the AFL-CIO more vigorously pursue plant-closing legislation if it cooperated with communist unions around the world...
...Cantor and Schor suggest that it depends on the extent to which the leaders of our best unions apply themselves to the problem—asking the same kind of tough, bread-and-butter questions they ask in dealing with the everyday problems of their members...
...There is no non-alignment, no third way, no alternative model of economic and social development...
...Either you are pro-capitalist or pro-communist, proAmerican or pro-Soviet," they charge...
...government sources...
...Virtually all of the funding—over $40 million a year, more than the AFL-CIO spends on all of its domestic operations—comes from U.S...
...Cantor and Schor do not take issue with this reasoning...
...Written test, TV debates, vote by phone from home...
...They have had very little to say about the relation of that coup to the past thirty years of repression against workers and unions in Guatemala...
...q New way to directly elect president...
...Names and numbers constantly shift from one posting to the next...
...But when the AFL-CIO continued to apply this same simplistic view to movements and governments in the developing world, the policy, at least in terms of its own declared objectives, self-destructed...
...216pp $6.95 The New Election Game W.J...
...Not since thirty years before, when Walter Reuther took on Brother Meany's view of the world, had the official House of Labor heard such a SUMMER • 1988 • 381 ruckus over foreign policy...
...The authors treat the infamous case of Guatemala in 1954 as an example of what went wrong...
...For the American labor movement this is one of the paramount, pivotal issues...
...Afew years back, acknowledging its losses in membership and power, the AFL-CIO launched a fairly serious critique of its policies and operations...
...After all, to follow the logic of the DIA's anti-Sandinista campaign, shouldn't we now consider cooperation with those communist-led, anti-Sandinista unions in Nicaragua that share our goal of defending workers' rights against the Sandinista government...
...Missing from that critique was any discussion of labor's foreign policy, an absence that was not surprising...
...Members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council looked at the agenda of their meeting last winter and saw that they were to discuss the Cantor and Schor "Attack on AFL-CIO Policy," in the felicitous phrasing of a memo prepared by AIFLD staffer David Jessup and distributed at the meeting...
...Last year's bastion of free democratic unionism is this year's terrorist front and vice versa...
...It's possible that in Europe immediately after the war this imposition of a bipolar, East-West political frame had plausibility...
...Because this has begun to happen in regard to South Africa and Central America, we have seen the first hopeful signs of federation foreign policy kicking and screaming its way into the real world...
...The AFL-CIO understands it is essential to help develop strong, democratic unions abroad...
...unions—and applied it in a country where working people absolutely needed more politicized unions...
...It was without doubt a terrible mistake and established the pattern: the overthrow of Bosch in the Dominican Republic, Goulart in Brazil, Allende in Chile, and on through the current fiascos in Central America...
...Cantor and Schor define that legacy—the "Tunnel Vision" of their title—as the strategy of cold war anticommunism adopted by labor following World War II, and carried on to this day...
...the subject, United States aid to the Nicaraguan contras...
...The powerful COSATU federation of black workers in South Africa, for example, virtually refuses to speak with the AFL-CIO because of its funding of rival unions deemed less radical, though in this area there have been recent signs of a new realism within the federation...
...312)887-0330 SUMMER • 1988 • 383...
...all other questions . . . must remain secondary...
...Although many of the federation's training and assistance programs in developing countries are quite good and carried out by dedicated trade unionists, its apparatuses in those countries are knowingly utilized by American ambassadors and CIA station chiefs to carry out their missions — which, it may safely be assumed, do not consistently reflect the needs and interests of workers at home or abroad...
...While on the subject of logic, there is the matter of how the federation's foreign policy is funded...
...The late AFSCME leader, Jerry Wurf, once said he could challenge George Meany on any domestic issue but not on Vietnam...
...Documents galore back up the contradictory charges...
...This challenge to the consensus on labor's foreign policy that erupted in 1985 continues to frame debate at the highest levels of the movement...
...The book opens pointedly with an account of the debate on the floor of the 1985 AFL-CIO convention...
...More than twenty years ago Bill Dougherty of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) stated what remains the controlling vision of federation policy: "The key question is the future of Latin American revolution: toward communist totalitarianism or toward democracy...
...Although the memo expends most of its effort defending the AFL's immediate postwar European policies, it does raise two important questions...
...If it did not come up with a lot of terrific answers, it did ask a lot of the right questions...
...Guatemalan workers needed a radical restructuring of land and labor relations and they freely elected a government determined to carry out these changes...
...The time, energy, and resources devoted to these intrigues are mindboggling...
...Cantor and Schor argue that there is a spectrum of economic and political systems between those two poles and that by refusing to recognize those middle ranges the DIA isolates American workers from important allies in the developing world...
...Kelleher, Ph.D VISA Mastercharge 1-800-323-3244 ILL...
...If that outbreak should become a full-fledged epidemic, this book will deserve some of the credit...
...Jessup asks rhetorically...
...The American labor movement took a formula that seemed to have worked so well in Europe— undermine communist-controlled unions and foster rivals that resembled the more moderate U.S...
...Closer to home, the DIA signed up early in the Reagan administration's crusade against Nicaragua, trying like the devil to pull together an opposition labor front to work in conjunction with the contras to bring down the Sandinista government...
...Periodically the DIA publishes a list of "good" unions and "bad" unions in that country...
...Imagine the reaction of any labor leader in this country to, say, a think-tank that got 95 percent of its funding from big corporations and yet claimed to be absolutely independent...
...It was not a communist or even socialist government, though it was supported by radicals and nationalists of various hues...
...They argue that this strategy was flawed at birth, its impulse springing not from labor's own needs but from the objectives of American corporate and governmental elites of the period...
...This time there was no question of leaving the federation, as Reuther eventually did...
...To the consternation of the federation's Department of International Affairs (DIA), representatives of several major unions wanted a clear denunciation of the Reagan administration's support of the contras...
...It was the beginning of a rebellion that poses a challenge to the Meany legacy across the entire spectrum of labor's foreign policy...
...For what they are saying and amply document is that some of the most powerful unions in the developing world—unions leading the fight for workers' rights in their countries and for restrictions on multinational capital that would benefit American workers—are neither communist nor affiliated with the WFTU...
...Is there light at the end of this tunnel...
...The event that triggered the CIA coup overthrowing the Arbenz government was its attempt to nationalize United Fruit Company land...
...This time the argument was driven by the conviction that these questions were just as important as—and intimately linked to—many domestic issues...
...And although there are no easy formulas for shaping this new policy, Cantor and Schor have raised all the right questions and have examined them with the rigorous and honest intelligence they deserve...
...The conditions that had shaped American unions simply did not exist in Guatemala...
...American labor officials played an active role in the coup and were proud of it...
...American labor still has not come to grips with the consequences of such actions throughout the hemisphere...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
