CONFERENCES: Free Labor

At war’s end, when foggy hope of cooperation between the democracies and Communism swirled everywhere, labor unions of 56 nations got together in Paris and set up the World Federation of Trade Unions. The organization included Soviet Russia’s state-run “unions,” big Communist-infiltrated unions like those in France and Italy, and genuinely democratic labor organizations. Early this year, emerging out of the postwar fog of confusion, Western labor finally fully realized that the only way to “cooperate” with Communists is to submit to them. The U.S.’s C.I.O. and Britain’s T.U.C. (Trades Union Congress) walked out of the W.F.T.U.; the other non-Red unions followed.

In London’s County Hall last week, 261 delegates from 53 countries, representing some 48 million members, met to launch a new international non-Communist labor organization. Provisional title: the Free World Labor Congress.

The Young Upstarts. On hand to help launch the new organization was a platoon of top U.S. labor leaders, including aging William Green and dynamic David Dubinsky of the A.F.L., straight-talking Walter Reuther and diplomatic Allan Haywood of the C.I.O. Outstanding among the Continental union leaders was The Netherlands’ pudgy J. H. Oldenbroek, general secretary of the powerful International Transport Workers’ Federation, which has 4,000,000 members in some 45 countries. In the fall of 1944, Oldenbroek helped organize the general strike in Nazi-ruled Holland. In an election this week, he was likely to be chosen for the job of general secretary of the congress.

Because there was free speech at the London conference, there were disputes. Hardly had the honeyed addresses of welcome ended when some delegates charged that Roman Catholic unions on the Continent, which have their own federation (International Federation of Christian Trade Unions), were being excluded from the new organization. Reuther patched up this fight by a compromise: the Catholic unions (which are among the toughest anti-Communist fighters on the Continent) would be invited to come in, but would have to quit or disband their own international organization within two years.

Hardly was the conflict over the Catholic unions settled when a new fight broke out—about the site of the new organization’s headquarters. The T.U.C.’s Arthur Deakin fought for London. Some Americans favored almost any place but London. The squabble was a reflection of a deeper rift. The Americans considered the British T.U.C. leadership to be undynamic, bogged down in home worries and tied to the British Labor government’s colonial and foreign policies.

The older and more experienced British unionists, whose power in the labor world was once undisputed, clearly resented being crowded by what seemed to them young upstarts, with pushing ways, loud ties and big, expensive cigars. They were annoyed especially when Mike Quill, truculent boss of the U.S. Transport Workers and a professional Irishman, blurted that Northern Ireland was “a slave state.”

The New Poor. The British resentment of their fraternal brothers from the U.S. —which was part of the attitude, familiar in postwar Britain, of the new poor toward the new rich, the new weak toward the new strong—expressed itself in petty ways. David Dubinsky wanted Mrs. Dubinsky to attend the London meetings. The T.U.C. leaders, acting as hosts, said that there were only 40 tickets for visitors and that none could be spared for delegates’ wives. “Okay,” said Dubinsky, “but the American delegation is entitled to a couple of advisers. Make her an adviser.” The British quickly gave Mrs. Dubinsky a visitor’s ticket. “We won the strike, didn’t we,” crowed Dubinsky. “The British can’t push us around.”

In a sense, Dubinsky had come close to the spirit of the new labor group: in the long run, nobody would push anybody around. The congress was a free association of unions led by workers from the world’s greatest, richest industrial nations. Its members knew that, with Communism, the workers of the world had nothing to gain but their chains.