Conspiracy, Class & the American Empire

Youbin Kang

Blue Collar Empire:
The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade
By Jeff Schuhrke
Verso, 2024, 352 pages, $29.95 paper.

Teamsters Metropolis
By Ryan Patrick Murphy
University of Michigan Press, 2025,
258 pages, $29.95 paper.

TWO HISTORICAL WORKS written from newly uncovered CIA and FBI archives — Blue Collar Empire by Jeff Schuhrke, and Teamsters Metropolis by Ryan Patrick Murphy — detail the interventions of the U.S. government in the labor movement abroad and at home through diametrically opposed representations of legitimate unionism.

Respectable unionism, defined by bureaucratic cooperation aligned with national interests, is posed against countercultural unionism, which is solidaristic, militant, oftentimes left-wing, and unruly.

Schuhrke examines this distinction’s use in geopolitical warfare through decades of CIA involvement in AFL-CIO-sponsored programs abroad, while Murphy traces its use in the construction of the white, suburban middle class through the history of the rise and fall of the Teamsters in postwar America.

Rather than a confirmation of conspiracies or seductive mysteries, many of which surround both the FBI and the CIA, these two monographs are reminders of the tenuous relationship between the state and the labor movement, as well as the promises and limits of ideology, past and present.

Blue Collar Empire details the ideological corruption of the American labor movement abroad like an exposé of a crime scene investigation. A dogmatic plumber turned politico and head of the AFL (George Meany), a spiteful defector from the Communist Party turned CIA operative (Jay Lovestone), and dapper social climbers in Washington DC (Lane Kirkland) are the players; the world is their game, the CIA is bankrolling, and the payout is the defeat of communism.

FTUC, AIFLD and NED

Schuhrke weaves through the evolution of these interventions across their various institutional forms. The Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), established in 1949, partnered with the CIA to covertly forward the American crusade against communism, using networks based on the AFL’s existing international relationships.

By 1958, the merger of the AFL and CIO brought this relationship more fully into the open, with USAID and the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) administering training programs designed to transform Third World unionists, often organized through communist projects and ideologies, into bureaucratic union leaders.

This apparatus later took the form of the National Endowment for Democracy, which continued such efforts in the height of détente, and was ultimately reconstituted as the Solidarity Center in the 1990s — an iteration seemingly shaped by the era’s exposures as well as antiwar and civil rights movements.

At times, in the absence of a strong throughline, the book reads like an encyclopedia of the labor movement’s more unsavory entanglements abroad. While the theoretical scaffolding of the book is centered on theories of development (modernization, dependency), the more compelling takeaway was the way ideology was concretized through distinguishing the two polar notions of legitimate unionism.

For example, in the early 1960s, the AFL-CIO labeled Brazil’s left-leaning president Joao “Jango” Goulart as an “erratic opportunist” and opposed the General Workers Command which united 600 communist and noncommunist unions. (138)

Later, in 1963, a year prior to the U.S.-backed military coup to oust Goulart, the AFL-CIO hosted 33 unionists to train them on thwarting communist infiltration. The trainees were subsequently employed to take control of communist-led unions, backing what AIFLD advocated as “responsible” unionism. (140-141)

What is at stake? Schuhrke’s central critique is that, rather than prioritizing grassroots organizing and cultivating an internationalist left, the AFL-CIO and its leadership devoted significant energy and resources to what he terms an “unwholesome alliance with Washington’s foreign policy apparatus.”

The consequence, he argues, was the consolidation of a global order in which workers wielded diminished power while an increasingly unrestrained capitalist class came to dominate. (283)

Covert Intervention and Consequences

A question that begged my reading: what degree of agency can an ideologically legitimated and well-resourced minority exert over the course of history?

If those scattered sums of CIA money — $100K here, $20K there, distributed through clandestine channels by American unionists to anti-communist trade unions around the whole world — could indeed shape political outcomes so dramatically, what does this imply for the labor movement today, when uncharted sums of dollars are concentrated in far fewer hands?

Narratives of covert intervention often foreground highly influential, premeditated and successful actors. While compelling, the simplistic narrative risks assigning disproportionate blame within an opaque and uncontrollable historical process. At the same time, these simplified narratives can flatten the complexity of historical change.

The harms wrought by cold warriors of the U.S. labor movement were undeniably consequential. Take, for example, the toppling of Salvador Allende’s socialist regime in Chile.

Seventy-nine Chileans participated in AIFLD training programs. While they did not infiltrate the CUT (Unitary Central of Workers), the largest trade union federation that helped bring Allende to power, they were able to exert influence over professional associations known as gremios.

Strikes organized by these gremios in the mining and trucking sectors contributed to widespread social disarray which, alongside an economic crisis exacerbated by the withdrawal of U.S. aid, opened the doors to Pinochet’s violent coup in 1973.

The incorporation of free-trade liberalism (shaped by the “Chicago Boys”) worked in tandem with monetary sanctions and the infiltration of gremios by AIFLD-trained actors. Together, these forces contributed to the collapse of the left-wing and communist project in the third world.

Yet important questions remain: how were the gremios able to organize so rapidly? Why did capitalism prove so seductive to segments of the Chilean middle class? More broadly, why was the ideology of “freedom” and anti-communist trade unionism so readily taken up within labor movements across the globe and progressive factions at home?

Schuhrke doesn’t delve into these questions within movements abroad, but provides glimpses of the dilemma in the discussions that embroiled the leadership in the United States.

Prosperity and Conflict

Marx and Engels discuss ideology in the following terms: “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” (The German Ideology. From Karl Marx: Selected Writings. 2nd ed. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford University Press, 181)

What about the conditions of life made anti-communism so desirable for the rank and file across America that it turned a blind eye? The prosperity of war? The attractiveness of being on the winning side? The white picket fence, wife, a car, and two children? Upward mobility made possible by the deals that anti-communist unions made with the employer?

These were questions that progressive union leaders like Walter Reuther grappled with in his support for the Vietnam War. When confronted by family friends who were activists, Reuther lectured that the UAW could not afford to alienate President Johnson; it was “no time to split the union on this kind of ideological issue.”

To this, a labor leader retorted, “What are you trying to do, maybe get eighty cents an hour in the pay envelope, five cents here, five cents there? You’re telling me that you are unwilling to make a statement that may save fifty thousand lives or one hundred thousand lives or maybe a million lives because you want to get fifty more cents in your God-damn fucking contract … That’s the most inhumane thing I have ever heard in my life.” (178)

In another episode, Schuhrke recounts the events leading up to construction workers’ assaults on student protesters, undertaken in exchange for Nixon’s appointment of a union leader as Secretary of Labor.

Such moral quandaries came to define the 1970s within the rank-and-file of the AFL-CIO. The antiwar movement opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the anti-apartheid movement targeting South Africa disrupted the moral coherence of respectable “free” trade unionism that the AFL-CIO had espoused abroad.

The rank-and-file movements and progressive locals including Leon Davis’ Local 1199, the United Farm Workers, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFCSME), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers within the UAW, and later the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists began to question the alignment of U.S. union interests with state violence abroad. (191, 192, 248)

Teamster Culture Reconsidered

Ryan Murphy’s Teamsters Metropolis sharpens the analysis of “life” in its relationship to “consciousness.” Cold War unionism coincided with the consolidation of the American project of white, suburban, middle-class prosperity.

Drawing on FBI files, congressional records, court transcripts and internal union documents, Murphy reconstructs how the state’s targeting of the Teamsters functioned as a project of racial formation and prescription of the heteropatriarchal family. This provocative account of the Teamsters and union president Jimmy Hoffa challenges several received views of America’s largest union from the 1940s to the mid-1970s.

The unruly, urban and ethnic audacity of the Teamsters and their social and sexual practices outside the bounds of heterosexual domesticity are positioned in stark contrast to the project of whiteness espoused by the state during this time. It unfolds in a televised hearing that put Robert F. Kennedy in the spotlight chairing the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor Management Field, the “McClellan Committee.”

Murphy traces this tension across several thematic chapters: the urban unruliness of the Teamsters’ muscle-forward organizing tactics; the state’s problematization of Teamsters comportment; the ideals of pleasure through investment in oceanfront properties through union pensions; the Black and Brown dissident union activists in New York in the 1950s; and the kinship and sexual practices of Hoffa’s right-hand woman, Sylvia Pagano.

Pagano, a daughter of Silcilian immigrants, was an adviser on investment deals between Hoffa and the Jewish and Sicilian underworlds. Murphy’s particularly enlightening “queering” of the Teamsters is done through the chapter on investments that emphasized pleasure outside work in Miami’s resorts, and the “queer domesticity” of Sylvia Pagano informed by unconventional family structures “that transgressed the boundaries of friendship, love, business, family, and the household” and the sharing of “productive and reproductive labor between men and women” and mixing “intimate ties with professional and political ones” (21) that defined the immigrant cities of the 1930s.

In so doing, Teamsters Metropolis serves as a compelling complement to Blue Collar Empire. It gives a domestic picture of the cultural mechanism that motivated polar representations of the legitimate unionist, divided by Cold War ideologies. It also examines how the contrast interacts purposefully.

Murphy presents the contradiction of the cohort of then-ethnic Teamsters whose unionism was able to achieve middle-class suburban domesticity, which “finally delivered safety, stability, space, and comfort to people whose families had survived pogroms, dispossession, famine, and political repression.”

At the same time, the Teamsters made use of transgressions on bourgeois culture — through Teamsters’ “crass” names like “Joseph “Scarface Joe” Bommarito or “Cockeyed Mickey” (72), flamboyant resort hotels in Miami, and the organizing drive in the service sector of Jewish and Catholic “new immigrant” communities.

“Hoffa saw what Max Weber did, that the U.S. economy flourished because it disciplined workers’ bodies” (197) The leadership’s flaunted and widely televised countercultural flamboyance of muscle and pleasure of the immigrant industrial metropolises of the earlier part of the 20th century, was the organizing machine that grew amongst the small-shop service sector rising from half a million in 1940 to 1.4 million in 1957.

Pragmatism vs. Principle

This interaction makes me think of Reuther’s dilemma. How did the polar representations, one rooted in profit-oriented pragmatism and the other in solidaristic principles interface?

Schuhrke’s account is opposite in outcome from Murphy’s. The AFL-CIO’s misguided focus on courting Washington through pushing its pragmatist line was a detriment to organizing, resulting in declining unionization rates through the latter half of the 20th century.

Comparing the two, perhaps both authors are pointing out the charismatic rousing of collective feelings, the romantic seduction of a countercultural alternative that a militant and radical refusal of pragmatism or respectability demands. Its power is squashed within the communist and left-wing fronts of labor movements abroad, but wields symbolic power for the Teamsters domestically.

May/June 2026, ATC 242