Open Letter to the Institute of Policy Studies:
It's Time to Take Off the Halloween Masks
Fred Hirsch and Kim Scipes

Dear Folks at IPS--

We received notice of the annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards program that took place on Wednesday, October 18 at the National Press Club Ballroom in Washington, DC.

We think you picked excellent awardees: Maher Arar and the Center for Constitutional Rights for the International Award, and the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign for the Domestic Award. Our comments below are not meant to demean/belittle the awardees in any way. In fact, we salute each of them.

We have long considered the Institute of Policy Studies a major progressive institution fighting for global economic and social justice in this country. We value your work overall, and have learned much from your work over the years. And we thank you for both.

However, we must state that we were outraged when we noticed that the Letelier-Moffitt Selection Committee included Barbara Shailor, who was identified as being from the AFL-CIO.

We are both long-time trade unionists. Fred is a now-retired member of the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters, but currently serving as Vice President of UA Local 393 in San Jose, California, and Kim (formerly a member of the Graphic Communications International Union, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers), is a member of the Chicago Chapter of the National Writers Union.

We have each been fighting the foreign policy program of the AFL-CIO for many years. As far back as 1974, Fred exposed the involvement of the AFL-CIO's AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development) in events preceding the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile. Kim has been involved since the early 1980s when he learned about the AFL-CIO's foreign operations while visiting British trade unionists in the UK.

Both of us have remained active on these issues over the years, and have done specific work on the origins of Labor's foreign policy (beginning in the 19-teens under AFL President Samuel Gompers), and AFL-CIO operations in regions and countries including Central America, Chile, the Philippines, Columbia and Venezuela. Kim has done extensive research and written widely-published material on the AFL and then AFL-CIO foreign policy program, both under former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and the current President, John Sweeney. Fred played a key role in getting the California AFL-CIO to unanimously condemn the national-level AFL-CIO foreign policy leadership at the Cal Fed's 2004 Biennial Convention. Both of us, along with others, worked to get the California resolution passed at the 2005 AFL-CIO National Convention, where the AFL-CIO leadership directly sabotaged internal labor movement democracy to keep the California resolution from being supported on the floor of the National Convention. We are both active in the recently-created Worker to Worker Solidarity Committee. (See our website at www.workertoworker.net, and for materials, look under "Links." For a more extensive listing of published materials on AFL-CIO foreign operations, please visit Kim's "Contemporary Labor Issues" on-line bibliography at faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes/LaborBib.htm ).

In other words, we each have long-time, extensive and detailed knowledge of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program.

The AFL-CIO leadership's foreign policy program--done behind the backs, and without the consent, of members of affiliated AFL-CIO unions, although "in our name"--has been a program of labor imperialism. Developed by the AFL-CIO foreign policy leadership--i.e., from WITHIN the labor movement, and not by the US Government, White House, or the CIA--the AFL-CIO has been involved in efforts to overthrow democratically-elected governments in Guatemala (1953, although still just the AFL), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), and Venezuela (2002). It has supported dictatorships in the first three countries (as well as in countries such as the Philippines, South Korea and Indonesia), worked to undercut progressive governments, undermined progressive labor movements, and (prior to 1986), actively worked to undermine the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

Tied into all of these activities, the AFL-CIO was one of the founders of the Reagan-initiated but horribly misnamed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was founded in 1983. The NED, initiated in response to exposure of CIA covert activities during the 1960s and '70s, was intended to do overtly what the CIA had tried to do covertly. The AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute was made one of the four core institutes of the NED, along with the international wing of the Democratic Party, the international wing of the Republican Party, and the international wing of the US Chamber of Commerce. The NED was US Government initiated, and although ostensibly "independent," has been continually funded by the US Congress, and its Board has included top level actors in the US Government's foreign policy apparatus, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, former National Security Council Chair Zbigniew Brzezinski, and current World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. The NED claims to be "promoting democracy" around the world, and it goes on ad nauseam about "free elections," but in reality, it's efforts have been to maintain or establish "polyarchal" or top-down "democracy" where people are free to choose between Pepsi and Coke--i.e., in other words, it has nothing to do with the one-person, one-vote form of democracy (popular democracy) that we in our country see as the essence of democracy. The NED has been an incredibly reactionary force around the world, and continues as such.

When John Sweeney was elected President of the AFL-CIO in 1995--the first contested election in its first 40 years of existence--foreign policy was one of the factors that led to his election. Sweeney used a language different from the traditional anti-communism of predecessors George Meany and Lane Kirkland, arguing for international labor solidarity. He restructured the AFL-CIO's foreign policy apparatus, combining previously semi-autonomous operations under a centrally-controlled American Center for International Labor Solidarity, ACILS, or in popular terminology, the "Solidarity Center." And he appointed a then-recognized progressive to be head of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department: Barbara Shailor. It looked to us that the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO had been transformed into something we could all be proud of. (This, however, was still done behind the backs and without the knowledge of American trade unionists, and the link with the NED--the "Solidarity Center" now replacing the Free Trade Union Institute as one of the NED's four core institutes--was maintained.)

However, as we now know, the AFL-CIO's foreign policy program was NOT transformed. The Solidarity Center was actively involved in events leading to the attempted coup in April 2002 against Venezuela's democratically-elected president, Hugo Chavez. Not only that, but the AFL-CIO refused demands to "open its books" and "come clean" about the past, even when demanded by affiliated labor organizations--most importantly, by the California State AFL-CIO, whose 2.4 million members were one-sixth of the entire AFL-CIO. Despite a more sophisticated operation since 1997, which HAS done good things where neither oil nor a transformation from the former socialist bloc have been central interests, the AFL-CIO has maintained its historical foreign policy program of labor imperialism.

Absolutely central to AFL-CIO foreign policy efforts since 1997--initially as head of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department (IAD), and then after the IAD was abolished in 2005, as head of the Solidarity Center--has been Barbara Shailor. While obviously working for the AFL-CIO as the IPS' "Selection Committee" notes, the fact is that Barbara Shailor has been at the very center of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program and operations since 1997, helping also to supply the labor leg of the four-legged National Endowment for Democracy.

Why the IPS would put ANYONE from the AFL-CIO's foreign policy apparatus on a Selection Committee to honor the memories of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt is simply beyond us: as is well-known, the AFL-CIO, through its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), was actively involved in events leading up to the 1973 coup in Chile, the aftermath for which Letelier and Moffitt gave their very lives. In fact, Fred had a conversation with Orlando Letelier at a conference in Mexico City in 1975 during which Mr. Letelier shared with him the opinion both he and President Allende held, that AIFLD had been a central factor in the US manipulated coup that delivered the people of Chile into the claws of the Pinochet dictatorship. During that same conference, Fred talked with Luis Figueroa, Allende's Minister of Labor and leader of the Central Unico de Trabajadores (CUT, Chile's immense labor federation). Figueroa stated that AIFLD was guilty of "fourteen years of treason." In the thirty one years since then, there has been neither recognition nor apology by the AFL-CIO for the role it played. To include anyone from the AFL-CIO's foreign policy apparatus on the Letelier-Moffitt Selection Committee is a very sick joke. We hardly believe that Orlando Letelier would have tolerated such inclusive collaboration.

If that wasn't bad enough, to include Barbara Shailor--a person at the very at the very center of the AFL-CIO foreign policy apparatus, with the bloody history her position represents--on the Committee was even more obscene. Do you plan to include Henry Kissinger on next year's Selection Committee????

Additionally, compounding all of this, instead of noting her role as current head of the Solidarity Center, you allow her to hide behind the "mask" of identifying her as from the AFL-CIO. In other words, it appears that by doing so, the Institute of Policy Studies was trying to sanitize Ms. Shailor's role and activities at the AFL-CIO.

This entire episode would be bad enough if IPS were simply "another organization." It is not. It has a long history of involvement and, at times, leadership of progressive work in this country. It has a history it should be proud of. And yet, in this case, it utilized some of its well-deserved reputation to sanitize the loathsome foreign policy program of the AFL-CIO, its unconscionable role within US foreign policy, and Barbara Shailor. We are sickened.

We are writing this as an "Open Letter," because these issues not only involve a leading progressive organization, but we fear are a symptom of the current "left" in this country, broadly speaking. Familiarity--within the Beltway, in this case--can lead to contempt as we all know, but it can also lead to collaboration.

We think this issue needs to be discussed within IPS specifically, and within the left more generally. Actions like this can undermine progressive struggles for social and economic justice in the United States and around the world.

We hope the Institute of Policy Studies will forever refuse in the future to include any person in a leadership position of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program in their projects--or ANY imperialist. We want the IPS to publicly respond to this letter--we eagerly await the public explanation for these events. Shailor heads the so-called Solidarity Center and is not elected by AFL-CIO members. And we want the Halloween mask pulled off one of the AFL-CIO's foreign policy leaders, and the mask to be pulled of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program as well.

In international labor solidarity,

Fred Hirsch
Kim Scipes