By George Morris

_} Alter Many years of -unsuccessful
tec atfort. to build a “labor front” for
= tral Intelligence Agency and U.S.

> fe in Africa, the top bureaucracy
thing AFL-CIO and its international

Tras director, Jay Lovestone, are now
8 new effort to penetrate French-

? mite former colonies in partnership
the edged Force Ouvriere (FO),
heme est labor group in France. The

pe funding the African-Ameri-
= Beconter of which the Veteran’
ipa Man in i

Wtirector the CIA, Irving Brown,

ee AF L-CIO bureaucracy became

y interested in Africa after then
a ont Richard Nixon returned
turin ur of Africa in 1957 with a report
N oa 4 wonderful opportunity for
d etration in areas that were colon-
Bt Uropean powers. Those powers
‘vocably tarred with their colon-
it ki 1xon observed, but ‘‘America
ve no such past in Africa. It is
: : that makes her heir to Africa’s
Date oy Quoted in a British Cabinet
Teby Nee and published in a pamph-
it 1960 : 1gerian Trade Union Congress
Apaine tled “The Great Conspiracy

Tica.’’)

te
the years that passed, hundreds of

tions for the millions of U.S. ap-
A), i Inte
ted Ny Feciable success was reg-
tas tha abor base.” One major
ey, Unions there Were already sub-
agi days thet Africa in pre-indepen-

t the col t €xperienced struggle

agi} caial industrial employers.
imperialism in. its
Cloak.

' Dresiges, Meany and Andre Ber-
Ment wae cf Force Ouvriere, an
French reached for joint opera-
After, th si & former colonies.
News © AFL-ClO’s Free Trade
tone for ted Sheet edited by
. y ‘
a eae CIO sal po
‘Sug, E and began plugging it in
after the nally, the scheme is
bor Deve merican Institute for
0.

APL cig”

ingpment (AIFLD), the
‘ Latin .vStrialist outfit for
Atpy te” uns Americans for what is

Y front Bets about $8 million

een My » at a meeting in
Riemeae Lreaident Kennedy
a r Arthur Gold-
More ued ways to give the
‘ “ €ctive and “‘popular”’

is financed from the U.S. coffers -

Meany, Brown
the CIA
and Africa

cover. AIFLD was exposed as a CIA cover
during the scandal of 1966-67.

Working towards the formal agree-
ment, FO had established in March 1972 a

so-called ‘‘Trade Union Institute for Co-

operation,’’ with an FO secretary, Pierre.
Galoni, as director. The plan is for Ga-
loni’s TUIC and Brown’s AALC to work
jointly. FO, it need hardly be noted, has
neither much membership nor treasury.
The money will come through Brown.
Galoni’s. men will provide the French
language contacts (possibly among Afri-
can students in France) and similar serv
ices.

How can one explain FO’s willingness

to enter such a partnership with the AFL-
CIO bureaucracy — and at a time when
there is hostility between most unions of
Europe and Meany’s crowd? Meany’s
recent denunciation of the leaders of the
International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (ICFTU), and especially
of the British union leaders, is an indi-
cation of the strained relations.

To understand the meaning of this
deal with FO, it is necessary to go into;
some background. Hardly had the AFL
and CIO leaders split away from the
World Federation of Trade Unions in the
coldwar forties (with the aid of the CIA),

and set up the ICFTU with U.S. money, .

than tensions flared up in the new federa-
tion over control and over the Meany de-
mand for an African division to be headed
by Irving Brown: Certain rightwing lead-
ers of British, French, Dutch and Belgian
unions resisted Meany’s pressure because
they. were just as zealous on behalf of
their former colonial rulers. Meany
charged that they were ‘‘soft’’ on com-
munism, and were leaving a “vacuum
in underdeveloped lands to the Commu-
nists.

By 1969, Meany’s group concluded
there was no hope for the ICFTU becom-
ing the vehicle for AFL-CIO penetration
into Africa. Meany announced withdrawal

from the federation his group was most -

instrumental in founding, deciding to
depend entirely on AIFLD, AALC and
a-similar outfit in Asia for his “inter
nationalism.” Through the years of inner
struggle in the ICFTU, Force Ouvriere

Black underground
gold miners in South
Africa average
$45.44 a month
(left); white under-
ground gold miners
get $575.10a
month (right).

was in Meany’s pocket, always “‘pro-
American,’’ because it was, in fact, a
creation of the AFL-CIO and CIA — with
U.S. money.

@

During the heat of the scandal in 1967,
with headlines exposing the way the CIA
used phony ‘‘foundations” to channel
money to student, labor, cultural and
other organizations to front for it, Thom-
as Braden, who was for a number of years
a top official in the CIA, confessed in an
article in the Saturday Evening Post (May
20, 1967) that it was he who conceived of
the CIA tactic. He recalled how one day
in 1950 he gave Irving Brown $15,000 (and

still has the receipt) for payment to
gangsters in French ports to attack the
“Communist-led”’ dock workers. He de-
scribed how Meany and. David Dubinsky,
of the garment workers, put Lovestone in
charge of the CIA’s drive against “‘Com-
munist-led’’ unions in Europe, notably in
France and Italy. with millions of CIA
dollars. One of the results of that drive
was the splitaway of a group from the

. French General Federation of Labor

(CGT) and formation of Force Ouvriere.

Meany has often boasted that AFL-
CIO operations in France “saved’’ that
country from communism. Joseph C.
Goulden, author of the recent biography
of Meany written with his cooperation,
cited a 1951 speech by Meany before
Chicago’s Catholic Labor Alliance, in
which he bragged that the FO existed
“primarily due to our effort.’’ The same

’ book cites Meany’s speech before the New

York Bond Club in 1964. He said, ‘“‘We
financed a split in the Communist-control-
led union in. France. We financed this
split — we paid for it.’’

“One group Irving Brown used as a
front,’’ wrote Goulden, ‘‘was the Jewish
Labor Committee in New York which
acted as a conduit to get AFL money to
the FO, ostensibly for Jewish relief. . . .
By 1947 the AFL was committed to send-
ing $5,000 every three weeks.” The Jew-
ish Labor Committee is a rabid anti-com-
munist anti-Soviet organization set up
and financed by Dubinsky’s group.

Little wonder then that FO is still in
Meany’s pocket and Irving Brown is still

head of the AALC with millions of AID
money in his hands for operations in Afri-
ca under Lovestone’s general direction.
Already in December 1971, in a greeting
.to the AFL-CIO convention in Miami
Beach, as reported in Lovestone’s sheet,
Pierre Galoni looked forward to the joint
operation. He said, ‘‘This is what we are

already doing in French-speaking Africa -
with the African-American Labor Council

and with our good friend Irving Brown.”
The objective is still the same disrup-
tive, splitting activity that was projected
in 1947—the year the CIA was established.
The so-called seminars and several tech-
- Rical projects, such as a garment-making

school in Kenya and an auto repair shop in

Nigeria, are just a come-on for swindling
unsuspecting African workers. The plan
is to use French-speaking agents just as
AIFLD uses Spanish-speaking agents.

The workers of Africa, rising to a new

militancy, as so well demonstrated in the’

current: strike wave of black workers in
South Africa, are hardly likely to give
more encouragement to agents of imper-
jalism today than they gave a generation
ago. But they do need international soli-
darity precisely because they are at a
higher stage of their struggle, confront-
ing most often the multinational compan-
ies of U.S., Britain, France and other
European firms. ;

They need more than an occasional

resolution of sympathy from the AFL-
CIO. They need funds to enable them to
Strike as long as necessary to win. They
neea real friendship, picket demonstra-
tions in front of the head office of the
multinationals, even sympathy strikes at
plants in the U.S. But the striking black
workers in South Africa have not received
a penny from the AFL-CIO.

Africa confronts U.S. unions in anoth-
er sense. Take, for example, the recent
announcement by the Anglo-American
Corp., a big gold mining company in
South Africa. The company said it will
give an average raise of 26% to the 120,000
black gold miners. Very generous? The
raise will bring the average underground
worker’s earnings to $45.44 a month. The
starting rate will be brought up to $29.53
a month. But white underground gold
miners get $575.1@ a month. The “‘gener-
osity’”’ for the blacks came in face of a
strike wave or the threat of a strike. With
such an advantage in black labor exploita-
tion, U.S. companies appreciate the pro-
tection they get from the racist govern-
ment of South Africa. As in some Latin
American lands, through AIFLD, they
want the help of the AFL-CIO’s “‘inter-

‘nationalism’ to keep things as they are.

The dirty role of AFL-CIO-FO-CIA in
Africa should be made known to the trade
unionists of Africa through every avail-
able channel. The trade unions of Africa
are well able to set their own policy
without the orféred ‘‘hejp,€ and most cer-
tainly not from men who have their own
racist stables to clean.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 1973—PAGE 3