International Double-Standard:

...If such an accusation should be made for the purpose of discrediting candidates in an election, for example, it might endanger the principle of freedom of association...

...that is, the links between trade unions and a democratic party and those between trade unions and a totalitarian party...

...American labor leadership agrees that the ILO is too important a world agency to become a victim of either Moscow, which sees it as a useful vehicle for Communist maneuvers in Asia and Africa, or of ultrareactionary American employers, who have been fighting it during the last decade for the same reason they have been fighting unions during the last century...

...Your study team is completely free to go where it will...

...last spring, it was given a letter by Mitchell which said that "the United States Government will in no way seek to interfere, restrict, limit, control or influence the survey the ILO is making...

...It is this rather special position of the Party that has given it such enormous influence...

...Unquestionably, this ILO document will be used in a vast world-wide propaganda campaign in underdeveloped countries to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet trade unions to free trade unions...

...It found that anti-totalitarian provisions in union constitutions "may also be explained perhaps by a desire to conform to legislation concerning Communist activities and to keep in line with public opinion on this matter...

...In the case of the unsophisticated reader," wrote Mitchell, "the report gives the impression of praising the Soviet regime and of fully justifying the kind of subservient labor organization structure which the report itself points out exists in the Soviet Union...

...The Soviet Union, dropped from the ILO after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact led to its expulsion from the League, rejoined the organization in 1954...

...Then it goes on to say: "At all events, when the circumstances of the Soviet state are borne in mind it becomes evident that the place of the trade unions and the work they perform cannot always be the same as in countries in which the traditional forms and methods of trade unionism were developed...

...The ILO report does state: "There can be no doubt that in accordance with their rules the trade unions, like all other bodies in the Soviet Union, have to follow the leadership of the Party in their policies and activities...

...AFL-CIO: "There is a distinction between the formalities of selecting union officials and the democratic process through which union members can offer alternative views on issues, alter the procedure of electing their officers, or reject the policies of their leaders...

...Thus the report on America observes, "What a particular law says, for example, can be ascertained as a fact, but people may have different opinions [on how] the law is carried out...

...Nonetheless, its democratic members must take a new, long look at the ILO...

...In their defense of the workers' interests and welfare, the unions continue to urge the workers to make the greatest possible contribution toward strengthening the economy and raising the general standards of living...

...The report on the U.S...

...It also was accompanied by Y. I. Gouk, a counsellor in the ILO who is a Soviet citizen, and the places to be visited were worked out with Soviet officials...

...Forty years of lies and deceit about the trade unions and working conditions of the Soviet Union," begins the first of two Worker articles, "are smashed to smithereens in the justpublished 136-page report...

...The Soviet report, while it contained some things which I agreed with, contained other matters which I did not believe were equally in the same open, critical vein which characterized the report on American trade unions...

...Among its critics are former Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg and the Free Trade Union News, AFL-CIO official publication...

...Yet in the United States, the report said, the ILO investigators "felt it necessary to inquire very closely" into the question of corruption and racketeering...

...ILO trade union reports reveal INTERNATIONAL double-Standard By Arnold Beichman A FEW MONTHS AGO, the International Labor Organization (ILO), a government-labor-management world agency whose simple purpose is "to promote social justice in all the countries of the world," published a staff report on "The Trade Union Situation in the U.S.S.R...

...which has raised an angry storm of protest in American labor circles...

...What has particularly disturbed American labor leaders was the sharp contrast in the standards applied by the ILO staff to its report on America, "The Trade Union Situation in the United States," and to its survey of Soviet trade unions...

...It was in the United States, too, not in the USSR, that the ILO factfinders applied as their guiding principle the need to "take account partly of real and definite facts and partly of impressions...

...AFL-CIO: "The question whether this "enormous influence' of the Communist 'elite' may not be the result of coercion backed by the full power of a ruthless police state has apparently not been considered by the mission...

...Actually, the relations between the Soviet trade unions and the Communist party are comparable to those under a fascist regime—in Mussolini Italy, in Nazi Germany, in Franco Spain...

...and to report whatever it may find...

...The problem of antiCommunism in American labor apparently troubled the ILO team...

...AFL-CIO: "Apparently the authors of the report do not see any difference between, let us say, the relations between the (British) Trades Union Congress and the Labor party on the one hand, and the Soviet trade unions and the Communist party on the other hand...

...On the contrary, the remedy for improving the ILO, he said, "is to move forward to more vigorous and effective participation in the work of international bodies...

...its 96 members include Communist and other dictatorship countries (any UN member automatically becomes an affiliate by announcing its adherence to the ILO constitution...

...Arnold Beichman, a frequent New Leader contributor, has reported on international labor for over a decade...

...for the bona fide labor movement of an open society, there is unsmilingly duteous criticism...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that shortly after taking office Secretary of Labor Goldberg declared at the National Press Club: "I did not like the report of the ILO on the Soviet trade unions...

...In the New York Times of January 30, Cyrus L. Sulzberger reported that, in addition, "the USSR sent an official interpreter with the ILO group, read the report on Soviet labor before it was issued and insisted on many alterations...

...But the report on the USSR somehow fails to even mention the cultural, political and "social origin" discrimination against workers in that country...

...and on and on for a full page...

...Returning to the provisions of union constitutions," the report on American labor said, "experience in the United States and other countries has shown that the accusation of being a Communist, and a fortiori, the vaguer charge of 'giving support' to the Communist party, even when false, is difficult to refute...

...Goldberg made clear that his criticism did not presage any U.S...

...The cause of the present flareup becomes clear when some of the statements in the report on Soviet trade unions are placed alongside the analysis of them that appeared in the AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News: ILO: "From the mission's contact with Party members, it gained the impression that they constituted a dedicated minority with a sense of purpose...

...it should not be permitted to do the same thing in the International Labor Organization...

...The tripartite ILO has a noble history that stretches over more than 40 years...

...And: "While continuing to be organizations which represent and speak for the workers, the unions are participating to an even greater extent in running and strengthening the Soviet State...

...to talk to whomever it wants...

...I thought the report on the Americans, while I took exception to it, was a hard hitting, objective report which was very penetrating and, while I took objection to some of the conclusions, I felt that the objections I had were in the range of legitimate difference...

...contains a discussion based on many private interviews about discrimination against Negro workers in some American unions...

...The difference between the two ILO staff reports obviously is in the application of a double-standard: For the so-called unions of a closed society, there is gracefully bland reporting of the facts...

...Good...

...He also reported that Labor Secretary Mitchell had protested to ILO Director General David Morse about the publication of, in Mitchell's words, "page after page of admittedly unevaluated laudatory material about the Soviet system, much of it irrelevant to the trade union situation...

...The sole remnant of the League of Nations, it is now an independent United Nations specialized agency...

...It examined labormanagement laws to see whether they inhibited the right of freedom of association...

...The AFL-CIO Executive Council, now in session in Florida, issued a formal criticism of the document this week which coincided with the opening of the ILO Governing Body meeting in Geneva on February 28...

...In fact, I can tell you that before I became Secretary of Labor, I wrote, as a private person, to the Director of the ILO indicating my views in this regard...

...The Kremlin has succeeded in threatening the very life of the United Nations...

...In the USSR, the ILO mission was chaperoned by a representative of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and a representative of the Soviet State Labor and Wages Committee...

...ILO: "Trade union bodies are elected democratically and are answerable only to the persons who elected them...

...When the ILO mission came to the U.S...

...ILO: "Links between the trade unions and a political party are not peculiar to the Soviet system...

...The official Communist position on the ILO study is to be found in the Sunday Worker (February 19), which extolled its contents...

...withdrawal from the ILO...