The Alliance for Progress, whatever it signifies for Latin America, has meant for American labor an alliance with government and big business. American labor has never minced words about the unions of the Soviet Union. “The so-called trade unions in the USSR,” the AFL-CIO Executive Council has proclaimed, “are nothing but agencies of the Communist dictatorship.” The implication, sharp and clear, has always been: Unions of America are anything but agencies of government and big business. That has been a pride of American labor, but the new alliance raises questions that may make that pride ring a bit hollow.

British Guiana is a good place to begin. American Government, business and labor have never been happy with the leftist administration of Cheddi Jagan that took office after the August, 1961, elections in the British colony. American woes and worries have multiplied with the approach of independence. The AFL-CIO boasts of its part in helping the trade unions there battle the Jagan government. “In British Guiana,” said a recent union advertisement, ‘‘the AFL-CIO has rendered generous aid to the free trade unions resisting the attempt of the pro-Communist Jagan regime to destroy their independence.” On the surface, American labor has moved into British Guiana to help brother unions fight communism. But the situation in British Guiana is far more complicated than that, and its “generous aid” has involved the AFL-CIO in racial and political strife. In addition, not all the aid given by the AFL-CIO has come from the labor treasury. In British Guiana, as elsewhere in Latin America, the AFL-CIO has operated with money supplied by the United States Government and big business. It is no secret: the AFL-CIO glows about its partnership with government and business in fighting communism in this hemisphere. Anyone expressing concern about the notion of an American labor movement becoming tangled in the purse strings of government and industry is pooh-poohed as a silly left-winger.

To the United States, Jagan’s Guiana looks like a budding twin of Castro’s Cuba. In 1961, Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP), supported mostly by the colony’s 269,000 East Indians, took 42.7 per cent of the vote and twenty of the thirty-five seats in the legislature. Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC), supported mostly by the 187,000 Negroes, took 41 per cent of the vote and eleven seats. Peter D’Aguiar’s United Force, supported mostly by businessmen, the 66,000 Portuguese and other mixed racial groups, took 16 per cent of the vote and four seats. Since then, American money has been shipped into the colony in support of the two opposition parties.

D’Aguiar’s United Force has received money from radical Right organizations. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, which is now appealing for more money to fight Jagan, channels funds to D’Aguiar. The AFL-CIO has pumped its funds into the Guianese trade unions, largely Negro and urban, which are the backbone of Burnham’s PNC.

In addition, the AFL-CIO and the international organizations under its influence have sent representatives into the colony to train the Guianese in American-style unionism, and have selected more than a dozen anti-Jagan union leaders for more intensive schooling in the United States. Much of this education program has been managed by the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an enterprise run by the AFL-CIO, partly with its own funds but principally with money made available by the Alliance for Progress and private enterprise. The institute has become an important arm of AFL-CIO operations in Latin America.

The strategy of Burnham and his union supporters has been to demand that Britain delay independence until there is a new election based on proportional representation, which would give Burnham almost the same number of seats in the legislature as Jagan and, possibly, the premiership or a partnership with Jagan. Jagan’s strategy has been to oppose proportional representation and to break the unions. Last April, when Jagan’s party tried to push through legislation that in the view of his opponents would give him control over the unions, the British Guiana Trade Union Council called a general strike. This strike, supported by the AFL-CIO, lasted eleven violent, murderous weeks and turned into a succession of race riots between Negroes and Indians. The end seemed a union victory: Jagan withdrew his legislation, and the British decided to delay independence.

In June, Jagan wrote a letter to The New York Times, giving his view of the events:

“Considerable evidence exists that the strike is not industrial but rather politically inspired by the opposition and by business elements opposed to the government’s program of social and economic reform. . . . Local trade unionists known to be hostile to the government - and none others - have been trained by the American Institute for Free Labor Development to overthrow my government. Serafino Romualdi, head of the Institute, has described his opposition to my government. The Trade Union Council campaign of passive resistance organized by US-trained unionists is openly supported by the opposition parties and has led to racial violence.”

A month later, Jagan amplified these charges, telling the Associated Press that the American Institute for Free Labor Development had given the Trade Union Council $2 million for a housing scheme and that, other sources had contributed $1.2 million to the trade unions of British Guiana during the strike.

Romualdi, in a statement, replied that when he had last visited British Guiana in April, 1962

“. . . it appeared to me that young democratic trade union leaders would need intensive training to combat Dr. Jagan’s efforts. Subsequently, eight Guianese came to Washington in June, 1962, as participants in the institute’s first course. In September of that year, six of these men returned to British Guiana, supported by AIFLD internships, enabling them to put into practice, on a full-time basis, what they had learned at our school. . . . When the BGTUC decided to call a general strike in an attempt to prevent passage of Dr. Jagan’s labor bill, I was asked to put the institute’s six interns, who were working with various local unions, at the disposal of the council’s strike committee. . . . In agreement with the institute’s Secretary-Treasurer, Joseph A. Beirne, I instructed the interns to fully devote their efforts to supporting the strike, and extended their internships, which were scheduled to end on June 15, to August 15. . . . I would like to say that I am proud of our graduates in British Guiana. In spite of sacrifices and hardships they kept their places in the front lines of a difficult and, unfortunately, sometimes bloody battle.”

The institute said that while it discussed possible housing aid it never gave the BGTUC $2 million for a housing project or contributed $1.2 million to the strike coffers. Other U.S. labor sources, while agreeing that the institute did not make the contribution, say that the $1.2 million figure probably does not exaggerate the amount of American labor money that went into British Guiana during the strike.

The British Guiana strike and the charges of Jagan first drew wide notice to the American Institute for Free Labor Development. Today, the institute has become a main way for the AFL-CIO to carry out its Latin American good works, and it may become the model for AFL-CIO activities in other parts of the underdeveloped world. Its rapid development is an interesting story of present-day unionism.

Joseph A. Beirne, president of the Communications Workers of America, sold the idea of the institute to the AFL-CIO. In 1957, his union had invited sixteen Latin American communications workers to the CWA's education center at Front Royal, Va., for a three-month course in American-style unionism. When the Latins returned home, the Postal, Telephone and Telegraph International - the organization that links the CWA with other communications unions in the world - paid them salaries for nine months so that they could work as full-time unionists. In 1960, Beirne convinced the AFL-CIO council that it should expand this experiment into an ambitious program. By October, 1961, the institute was functioning, and Serafino Romualdi, for years the AFL-CIO's Inter-American representative, was named director.

The institute does not publish full financial details, but it is known that its 1963 budget was for $1,141,509. The institute says this income came from three sources: $500,000 or so from government, $300,000 or so from the AFL-CIO, and $300,000 or so from foundations and business. All the government funds, according to the institute, came from the Alliance for Progress program. The institute is also close-mouthed about its private donors and the size of their contributions. But representatives from W. R. Grace & Co., Pan American Airways, the Anaconda Company,  and the Rockefeller Foundation are on the board of trustees, and the institute offers their names when asked for a sampling of contributors. The United Fruit Co., symbol of imperialistic big business to many Central Americans, is not a supporter, but the institute has said that it would accept United Fruit money if it were offered.

Big business has backed the institute for reasons of enlightened selfishness. The days of economic imperialism seem numbered in Latin America; Castroism and communism loom. The AFL-CIO has convinced the businessmen that their only hope of surviving - though less arrogantly than of old - lies in a powerful, free, anti-Communist trade-union movement that protects the worker and siphons away his discontent. The companies, of course, proclaim more lofty motives. "We are very much in sympathy with the stated aims of the American Institute for Free Labor Development," says Julian L. Hayes, publicity manager for The Anaconda Company, which has extensive copper interests in Chile. “I am sure Mr. Serafino Romualdi is fighting for what he believes to be the rights of the laboring man in free societies. In free societies there are rights for the expressions of organized labor and equal opportunities for management to be heard . . . under law. Under a monolithic system, there is no freedom. We believe in freedom and the dignity of man."

The institute has two main activities - social projects and education. The social projects department, headed by William C. Doherty, Jr., has mushroomed into a prosperous agency of the Alliance for Progress. Although the financial arrangements are cloudy, it seems that the institute sets aside only government funds for the social projects department. Much of its work, in fact, is under direct contract with the Agency for International Development.

Doherty's department helps unions throughout Latin America to plan housing projects, worker coops, credit unions, banks, apprentice schools and other union projects, and to borrow in the United States the money necessary to build them. In the first fourteen months, the department received requests for help on 107 union projects. It has not had the time or resources to take care of all these requests, but during the period it did help Latin American unions obtain $13 million in AFL-CIO loans for housing in Mexico, Peru and El Salvador. Up to now, offices have been open only in Colombia, Peru and Chile, but the department plans to open more this year in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Jamaica, Venezuela, Uruguay, Ecuador and El Salvador.

The housing loan to Mexico, probably the department's most important project so far, illustrates how this activity of the American Institute for Free Labor Development works. The institute and the Graphic Arts Workers Union of Mexico drew plans for a $14 million housing project of ninety-seven buildings, containing 3,000 two- and three-bedroom apartments, at Colonia Jardin Balbuena in the center of Mexico City. The average price for an apartment would be $3,300, with monthly payments ranging from $22 to $48. The AFL-CIO used its reserve funds to lend $10 million to the Mexican union as soon as the AID agreed to guarantee full repayment of the loan in dollars. Construction began last December and is scheduled to be finished in August - all under the management of the institute’s social projects department. When finished, the homes will be known as the “John F. Kennedy Memorial Workers’ Housing Project.”

Despite the impressive scale of such projects, however, education is the main business of the institute. Since opening in June, 1962, its Washington school has trained 181 labor leaders from thirty-one Latin American nations and colonies. The interns usually receive a stipend when they return home so that they can devote themselves full time to unionism for at least nine months. In addition, the institute has set up schools or traveling instructor programs in eleven countries, and has trained more than 1,800 labor leaders on the spot. The Washington course covers United States political structure, the economics of underdevelopment, the history of the AFL-CIO, collective bargaining procedures, organizing methods, union finances, communism, dictatorship, Latin American militarism, consumer cooperatives, the history of the international labor movement, and analyses of labor movements in various nations.

The institute insists that no attempt is made to propagandize the Latin Americans. One graduate, José  Dolores Bautista of the Dominican Republic, has answered charges of brainwashing by saying: “I am very happy to be brainwashed in the free, friendly and comradely manner in which we are being brainwashed at the institute.

With Latin America so volatile, it would be difficult for the institute to stay clear of politics, even if it wanted to. British Guiana is one country where the institute became enmeshed in politics; Honduras is another. The military overthrow of the government of President Ramon Villeda Morales forced the institute into some definite political decisions, but its presence had been felt earlier in Honduras. Two graduates, Andres Victor Antiles and Santiago Pineda Puerto, wrested control of the Standard Fruit Company Workers Union from the Communists last August. About the same time, builders finished the first ten homes of a 102-house union project financed by AID and handled by the institute. In October, when the military junta took power, the institute found that some union leaders wanted to call a general strike against the new government. An institute official says that “Institute personnel urged union leaders to hold back a general strike on the basis that the Honduran Government at that point appeared to be determined to meet any opposition with extreme measures.” The institute, on the ground of the workers’ needs, also tried to persuade AID to continue the housing project, despite the State Department’s decision to suspend all economic aid programs to the new government. AID did not listen to the institute, but, when the United States finally recognized the military government, the housing project was the first AID program to be resumed. The military government, however, did not seem to appreciate the institute’s efforts. It closed down an AID-institute training school in Tela and, according to the institute, seized some of the study materials and burnt them as “Communist.”

The institute is not often scorned as “Communist.” Its anti-Communist rigidity and its ties with American capital have caused it far more difficulty in Latin America. The Catholic trade union movement, for one, will have nothing to do with it. One institute spokesman admits that ties with big business “hurt us at the start, but it’s coming to be accepted more and more.”

Nothing in the institute’s operations has provoked any evident concern at the White House or the State Department. The AFL-CIO has received only lavish praise for its efforts in Latin America. John F. Kennedy told the AFL-CIO convention last fall: “I want to express my appreciation for the actions which the organization has taken under the leadership of Mr. Meany, both at home and abroad, to strengthen the United States, to make it possible in this hemisphere for labor organizations to be organized so that wealth can be more fairly distributed.’’ President Johnson, in his December 16 letter to Assistant Secretary of State Thomas C. Mann, said “I want you to work closely with private United States groups and institutions carrying out activities in Latin America.” He then listed several groups. The AFL-CIO topped the list.

The word in Washington is that George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO and of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, is prouder of the institute than of any other international operation of American labor. Without doubt, the institute’s activities and directions clearly reflect the philosophy of Meany and of his closest adviser on international affairs, Jay Lovestone. Meany told the Chicago Executives Club last year:

“We have come a long way from the days of banana republics, when American companies ... made their deals with local tyrants, without regard to the welfare of the population. Mr. [J. Peter] Grace [president of W. R. Grace & Co. and chairman of the institute’s board] and others like him are well aware that the choice today is between democracy and Castroism, and that if democracy is to win, it must meet the needs and the desires of the people, starting with a higher standard of living. . . . While unions and management may quarrel over the terms of a contract, while the AFL-CIO and business spokesmen may be deeply divided on a wide range of domestic issues, from fiscal policy to federal housing, they should stand together in the great struggle of our times, the struggle that will determine the future and perhaps the survival of mankind.”

Words like these are what have drawn big business to Meany’s institute. Henry S. Woodbridge, board chairman of the True Temper Corporation and a trustee of the institute, says “U.S. business support of the institute is directly due to George Meany’s feeling, which he has expressed many times, that without free labor you cannot have free enterprise, and without free enterprise you cannot have free labor.”

It is not difficult to see the imprint of Jay Lovestone, the AFL-CIO’s international affairs director, on the operations of the institute, particularly in its fervent anti-Jaganism in British Guiana. Lovestone, once leader of the Communist Party in the United States, long ago transformed himself into one of the most rabid anti-Communists within the labor movement. Meany’s closeness to Lovestone has been a powerful irritant to Walter Reuther, the AFL-CIO vice president who headed the CIO before the merger, and to his brother, Victor Reuther, international affairs director of the United Auto Workers. The New York Times, after identifying the Reuthers as Lovestone’s opposition, had this to say about Lovestone recently: “To his enemies, Mr. Lovestone is a sinister figure, who, they say, has soured the relationships between the AFL-CIO and other free world trade unions by unnecessary intrigue and bitter feuding. They say that the single-mindedness of his anti-communism has put him in essentially a negative position that has made it impossible for him to work out positive programs that really would counter the Communists.”

The Reuthers are said to have three main objections to the institute’s operations. They feel that it has no business engaging in Central Intelligence Agency-type activities, that it hurts American labor by its rigid anti-Communist policies, and that it has no right to commit American labor to Anaconda and Grace and other giants of American economic imperialism. But the Reuthers are unwilling to endanger the CIO’s merger with the AFL by making an issue out of the institute. They have said nothing publicly about their misgivings and Walter Reuther is a member of the institute’s board of trustees.

The refusal of the Reuthers to make this a public issue has meant that no one so far has raised any questions about the way the institute has shaped its course. The silence is unfortunate, for pertinent questions need to be asked.

First, is it the business of the AFL-CIO to overthrow governments? Does the United States Government really want the AFL-CIO to serve as a junior CIA? American labor takes on such functions when it enters a British colony in aid of an opposition party trying to bring down the government. Senator Wayne Morse bellowed long and loud at American business firms for their part in the overthrow of President Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic. “We cannot justify at any time any intermingling, intervention, muddling or meddling on the part of American businessmen abroad with American foreign policy,” Morse told the Senate. It might seem that meddling by labor - even by labor mixed up with business and government - is as deplorable.

Second, can American labor really do a job in Latin America when it links itself in the minds of the peoples there with our government and business? In 1959, the University of Chicago’s Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change, reporting to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on ways American labor can help U.S. foreign policy, wrote that “in the light of historical experience, any suspicion that U.S. union activity is under the control or influence of the State Department or other official authorities would be disastrous.” The report also recommended that financial assistance to unions should originate exclusively with workers’ organizations. “We cannot advocate that trade unionism be independent of governments elsewhere, and at the same time blur the distinction between U.S. labor and U.S. Government.”

It is hard, too, to believe that Latin Americans will trust an American labor movement that works hand in glove with organizations like Anaconda and Grace. In fact, any Latin American labor organization that accepts institute assistance may make itself easy prey for the Communists. “How far can or should a US firm go in encouraging anti-Communist but free unions?” the University of Chicago report asked. “This is obviously a most delicate issue. Clearly any substantial and open support on the part of the company would turn the union into a company-dominated ‘yellow’ union and, at the same time, in the sociological climate of Latin America, make such an organization an easy target for Communist and possibly nationalist propaganda.”

The whole operation of the institute lays it open to Communist charges that it is doing the bidding of the U.S. Government and of big business, and a campaign like the one in British Guiana makes the charges very easy to accept.

Third, has the AFL-CIO made intelligent decisions about whom to support or reject? Has communism really suffered setbacks under the onslaught of the AFL-CIO? It seems inevitable, for example, that Cheddi Jagan will rule an independent Guiana some day, for no other reason than the fact that the East Indian population is increasing at a faster rate than the Negro [see “British Guiana: Prelude to Independence” by T. E. M. McKitterick, The Nation, Sept. 28, 1963] In addition, despite the general strike and the AFL-CIO money, his followers are making inroads in the trade unions.

And even if the AFL-CIO did succeed in ousting Jagan, it might have to worry as much abut his probable successor, Forbes Burnham. Ved Prakash Vatuk of Colorado State University wrote in a pamphlet for the Monthly Review Press last year “It is difficult to see where he and Jagan differ ideologically, even on the question of the desirability of ‘socialism’.” This was echoed by Associated Press correspondent Robert Berrellez, who wrote from Georgetown last June: “Pointing up the prevailing theory that the country is split racially rather than politically is the fact that, fundamentally, there is little ideological difference in the platforms of Jagan and Burnham.” Some political observers predict that Burnham, who once was a lieutenant of Jagan in the PPP, will return to the fold one day, and then where will the anti-Communist institute and its graduates be?

There is nothing wrong with American labor’s using its resources and experience to help unions and workers in Latin America. There is little to criticize, in fact, in the institute’s social projects program. Labor should take part in the Alliance for Progress and, with no hesitation, accept government guarantees on its loans to Latin American unions. But American labor should not play CIA and try to overthrow governments. American labor should not dilute its effectiveness by operating in Latin America on a budget that is supplied by the U.S. government and big business. “We in the AFL-CIO,” George Meany has said, “do not even try to influence the structure of the labor movements in other nations. We teach the fundamentals of union operation; but how the pieces are put together is up to the people involved.” US labor should live up to that boast.

Stanley Meisler is a Washington newsman.