Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War

2. “No More Pressing Task Than Organizing in Southeast Asia”

2“No More Pressing Task Than Organizing in Southeast Asia” For two years following World War II, the AFL internationalists fought a lonely, largely solitary cold war against communist in‹ltration of Western European unions. In 1947, however, the fortunes of free trade unionism turned markedly for the better. With the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the federal government emerged as a new, generous partner in the anticommunist cause. While a partnership between labor and the U.S. government risked compromising trade union autonomy, its fruits—greater resources with which to battle communism in Western Europe—were too alluring to resist. By 1950, anxious to expand its crusade, labor’s internationalists prepared to take their cold war to the third world. High on the list of regions drawing U.S. labor’s interest was Indochina. In Vietnam, a nascent trade union movement was struggling to carve out an independent existence in the midst of violent revolution. Much like their American counterparts, Vietnamese trade unionists prized autonomy, ambitiously seeking to break cycles of national impotence. Caught in a nether land between French colonizers and revolutionary communists, the middle course chartered by the leaders of Vietnam’s labor movement carried its own perils. With few available resources, early Indochinese trade unionists sought outside aid and leverage from any source available, including American labor. The Origins of Vietnamese Organized Labor While the history of mid-twentieth-century American organized labor can be told with reasonable certainty and the aid of abundant primary and sec29 ondary sources, the early history of Vietnamese trade unionism is considerably more shadowy. Indeed, what became the South Vietnamese labor movement took root in the late 1940s as an illegal underground assemblage of anticolonial nationalists, many of whom were veterans of the revolutionary Viet Minh. Despite stiff opposition from the French authorities, from its inception the nascent movement showed remarkable resilience, militancy, and pragmatism. Geographically, religiously, and ethnically diverse, and taking the shape, as natives described it, of a pole supporting two rice baskets, Vietnam was unlikely terrain for the emergence of a labor movement. The population— roughly 80 percent of which toiled in subsistence agriculture, with few owning land and many working on large, French-owned plantations— struggled under the oppression of French colonialism.1 Vietnamese not working the land might serve the French in supporting roles. By the 1940s, over one hundred thousand served the colonial army. Little in the way of industry existed. As historian Alexander Woodside noted, “Vietnam could barely match the labor force of preindustrial England.”2 In the north, some small industries, such as coal mining (eventually employing some ‹fty thousand miners), took root. By midcentury, small factories producing cigarettes or other items sprang up in cities throughout Vietnam. Companies such as the Société Indochinese pour Eaux et l’Électricité en Annam employed native workers in power plants supplying energy to central Vietnam . Still, Vietnam remained underdeveloped throughout the period considered in this study.3 Despite the paucity of industry, an Indochinese version of the “labor question” did emerge and eventually took center stage in the battle against French colonialism. Directly from these developments the movement later calling itself the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor evolved. “From the beginning,” explained historian William Duiker, “there was little question that the primary objectives of French colonial policy in Indochina were economic.”4 And cheap labor was crucial to this equation. Driven largely by rapacity, colonizers, beginning in the late nineteenth century , devised brutal means by which to control labor, creating conditions in many ways analogous to slavery. French colonists, scrambling to forge a pro‹table commercial agricultural sector, forcibly uprooted hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, many of them former landowners. Cruel native recruiters, known as cai, preyed on this newly landless population, harnessing it for labor on large plantations.5 Conditions on rubber plantations were particularly horri‹c, bordering on vassalage; workers suffered long hours, physical punishment, and rampant disease. In the interwar years, the mortality rate at one Michelin rubber plantation approached 50 percent. Overseers identi‹ed laborers solely by assigned numbers. In one Between a River & a Mountain 30 infamous case, a foreman beat to death a worker known only as Brother 70, generating a story that painfully lingered in the collective memory of Vietnamese workers well after the end of French rule. Elsewhere, working conditions in Vietnam’s light industries and the coal mines north of Haiphong were almost...