The Marshall Plan and the Split in the International Trade Union Movement

Abstract

The Marshall Plan not only divided opinion in the international trade union movement, but was also used as the issue with which to divide it institutionally. As the battle lines were drawn between communist and anti-communist trade unionists, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other national centres used the process of developing a combined response to the Marshall Plan as an opportunity to establish a new, temporary, international trade union body, the European Recovery Programme Trade Union Committee (ERPTUAC), and to withdraw from the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). This new organization shaped the response of the non-communist trade union world to the Marshall Plan and to the developing cold war. The result of this was to cut off British trade unionists on the far left from their main form of international support. Meanwhile, the ERPTUAC not only provided a massive pro-Marshall Plan propaganda programme, shaping the union response to the Marshall Plan across Europe, but also paved the way for a new, permanent international body, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. In this way, the domestic and international impacted upon each other to a very significant extent, as the TUC used the international split to further entrench its own leadership in Britain.