Tunisian and US Labor’s Cold War Alliance: “Free” Trade Unionism from Decolonization to Development

Abstract In 1950, as global Cold War battle lines became crystallized, Tunisia’s nationalist trade union center, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), pulled out of the Communist-led World Federation of Trade Unions and joined the Western-oriented International Confederation of Free Trade Unions a year later. This would prove to be a shrewd maneuver, as the UGTT soon forged a valuable alliance with the anti-communist leaders of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Viewing Tunisia’s national liberation struggle through a Cold War lens, the AFL-CIO believed it was critical to support the UGTT’s cause and keep it within the anti-communist, international “free” trade union movement lest the workers of Tunisia fall into the pro-Soviet camp. Later, after Tunisia gained independence in 1956, the AFL-CIO and a cadre of US development experts and diplomats held up the UGTT and its noncommunist, worker-centered “nation-building” efforts as a shining model for labor movements in other Third World countries to follow. But as the exigencies of development collided with union demands, a conflict emerged between UGTT and the Tunisian government in 1965—a conflict the government would win by imposing direct control over the supposedly “free” trade union center. This essay highlights both the opportunities and challenges that the Cold War presented to Third World workers’ organizations in the era of decolonization and underscores the tensions between the politics of Cold War anti-communism, the ideals of liberal democracy, and the urgency of economic development in postcolonial states.