LEPAIO Statement on Labor Day 2025: AFL-CIO: STOP Collaborating with Trump’s Fascist Gov

LEPAIO Statement On Labor Day 2025
(Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations: https://aflcio-int.education/)

AFL-CIO: STOP Collaborating with Trump’s Fascist Government

The foreign policy leadership of the AFL-CIO is collaborating with the fascist Trump Administration in Trump’s efforts to dominate the US and all of the other countries of the world. Most importantly is its long-term and on-going relationship with the Israeli Histadrut, which claims to be a labor organization but which is an essential component of the Israeli State. By this, the AFL-CIO’s top leaders are actively collaborating with Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

The support of and collaboration with Histadrut is only one piece of the AFL-CIO’s reactionary foreign policy. It has been a major “institute” of the US Government created and funded National Endowment for Democracy, a misnamed organization that has undercut popular democracy around the world, and which has provided the AFL-CIO over $1 BILLION since its founding in 1983 by the Reagan administration. This is in addition to approximately another billion dollars supplied by the US Government created Agency for International Development since the 1960s; USAID, which has a “liberal” reputation among some, has also long financed the reactionary foreign operations of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO foreign policy leadership has been working to restore Trump’s funding cuts so their reactionary operations can continue around the world.

Shawna Bader-Blau, head of the Solidarity Center, in a court document filed in February 2025, stated that, “The SC [Solidarity Center] estimates approximately 52 percent of the organization’s fiscal year 2025 would come from NED, or about $39.5 million.” [About 40 percent comes from other US agencies, such as US AID (Agency for International Development)-KS.] “Typically, the Solidarity Center would expect to have received approximately $3.3 million per month from NED.” That also suggests that the Solidarity Center’s annual budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of $78 million.

The AFL-CIO has conducted a foreign policy since the late 1890s (no misprint!) that has advanced US Government interests, although it has NEVER once given an honest report of these operations to its members that can be verified by independent researchers. These foreign policy operations by the so-called “Solidarity Center” have NEVER been ratified by open discussion and debate at any AFL-CIO national conventions, the highest decision-making body of the labor center.

What has been established definitively by researchers–many of them AFL-CIO members–has been its participation in overthrowing democratically-elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1973), and Chile (1973) and the total crushing of their respective labor movements, and it supported a military coup in Venezuela (2002) that was fortunately thwarted. This is in addition to supporting dictatorships in East Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan), as well as in the Congo and the white “apartheid” government of South Africa in Africa. It also has supported reactionary labor organizations against progressive ones, such as in the Philippines especially during the mid-late 1980s.

What we need is true international solidarity in order to fight the genocidal capitalist class. Workers need to run society for the good of all, but if we continue down this road we are likely to face total destruction of the planet either through war or through environmental collapse. It’s time to take the reins of power if we have any hope that there won't be a catastrophe that will annihilate life on the planet. For a workers’ state leading to a socialist society.

For more information on the Labor Education Project On AFL-CIO International Operations LEPAIO
https://aflcio-int.education

For resources on these claims and others, see

AFL-CIO Solidarity Center Warns Of Bankruptcy In DC Court Filing & Calls On Trump For More Funding
https://youtu.be/O6XbV3WL2OA
In a Federal Court filing and declaration on March 6, 2025 the Director of the NED funded AFL-CIO Solidarity

Schuhrke, Jeff. 2024. Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Anticommunist Crusade (Verso Press).

Scipes, Kim. 2010. AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books).

Scipes, Kim. 2020. “The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy: Where Historians Now Stand.” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 8, No. 2, article 5. On-line at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol8/iss2/5/ ,

"The NED funding freeze is an existential threat to the Solidarity Center’s mission,its partners, and the workers we serve."
https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/02ac-Exhibit-C-Solidairty-Center.pdf
https://groups.google.com/g/lepaio

The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, National Endowment For Democracy & US Imperialism
https://youtu.be/1PsmACDsKwQ

AFL-CIO Solidarity Center Director SHAWNA BADER-BLAU-Foreign Police For America- Bauder-We're working to strengthen support for principled U.S. leadership in the world
SHAWNA BADER-BLAU
https://www.fp4america.org/shawna-bader-blau/

Solidarity Has No Borders!