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"Comradely Brainwashing": International Development, Labor Education, and Industrial Relations in the Cold War
- Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas
- Duke University Press
- Volume 16, Number 3, September 2019
- pp. 39-67
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
In 1962, the AFL-CIO launched its government-funded labor education project in Latin America—the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD)—to spread the tenets of anticommunist, "free" trade unionism. From its earliest days, leftists and anti-imperialists accused the Institute of being a CIA front with the mission of "brainwashing" Third World workers into becoming counterrevolutionaries. While AIFLD was indisputably a Cold War program aligned with US foreign policy objectives, its goal of proselytizing US-style industrial relations should not be understood solely as a CIA-manufactured ploy. It was also the product of a broader social-scientific vision in the 1950s and 1960s to rapidly "modernize" the Third World and to stabilize labor conflict through rational, pluralist industrial relations.