Abstract
When the Joint International Trade Secretariats/International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ITS/ICFTU) Consultative Committee for Women Workers was founded in 1957, representation from the AFL-CIO, the largest and wealthiest affiliate of the ICFTU, was a conspicuous absence. Nor was there a US representative on one of the several International Trade Secretariats belonging to the committee. By 1964, the Women’s Committee, as it was coined, finally welcomed an AFL-CIO titular member, Ann O’Leary Sutter. However, Sutter attended only one meeting between her appointment and the AFL-CIO’s withdrawal from the international in 1969. Reliance only on ICFTU records, which document Sutter’s excuses for not attending meetings, could lead to the assumption that she could not sufficiently commit to the position. The AFL-CIO records, though, reveal that Federation leaders were behind the proffered excuses and that Sutter fervently wished to participate in the Women’s Committee.
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Notes
Lovestone’s anti-Communist fervor was a factor in the building of a strong personal and professional bond with CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton. Other labor officials in international affairs also had working relationships with the CIA that at times were contentious. Anthony Carew, “The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” Labor History 39 (1998). Michael HowardHolzman, James Jesus Angleton, The CIA, and The Craft of Counterintelligence (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
Quenby Olmsted Hughes, The Rise and Fall of the Early Cold War Alliance between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011).
John Boughton, “From Comintern to the Council on Foreign Relations: The Ideological Journey of Michael Ross,” Labor History 48 (2007): 64.
Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten, “Changing Gender Relations in German Trade Unions: From ‘Workers’ Patriarchy’ to Gender Democracy?” in Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions, eds., Sue Ledwith and Fiona Colgan (New York: Routledge, 2002).
John Herling, “Meany—Reuther Rift?”, Washington Daily News, February 12, 1957, AFL-CIO Reel 1, ICFTU Archives, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam (henceforth, IISH); Gary K. Busch, The Political Role of International Trade Unions (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 184–185.
For an account of European paternalism toward African trade unionists, see Yevette Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer, A Personal History of Labor, Race, and International Relations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
Adolph Sturmthal, Left of Center: European Labor since World War II (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 65, 227.
Norbert C. Soldon, ed., The World of Women’s Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical Essays (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 109.
21 ISFC/13, June 18–19, 1964, in November 30–December 3, 1964, 4/9, EB, GMMA. See also, Yevette Richards, Maida Springer, Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
See Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
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© 2013 Robert Anthony Waters, Jr. and Geert van Goethem
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Richards, Y. (2013). Marred by Dissimulation: The AFL-CIO, the Women’s Committee, and Transnational Labor Relations. In: Waters, R.A., van Goethem, G. (eds) American Labor’s Global Ambassadors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_4
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