In January 1966, Tunisia’s powerful trade union center, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), prepared to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its founding. In response to an invitation to attend the celebration, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), George Meany, wrote a lengthy letter to the UGTT’s secretary general.

“As you know, we have common memories going back to the days of the struggle of the Tunisian people for their national freedom,” Meany wrote, alluding to how US labor had encouraged Tunisia’s fight for independence from France years earlier. He further recounted how the AFL-CIO had long regarded “the UGTT as a model to be followed by the trade union movements in the developing countries” and had worked alongside it in advocating “the liberation of all African peoples from every form of colonialism”—a reference to not only formal European colonialism, but also to what the cold warrior Meany considered the de facto “colonialism” of Soviet influence.

“The AFL-CIO’s support of Tunisia and our cooperation with the Tunisian trade union movement were based on definite principles,” he continued. “We regret, however, that these principles have in recent months been violated in Tunisia.” The “principles” in question were those of “free” trade unionism, a term frequently used by anti-communists in this period that colloquially meant unions free from state control, but more precisely denoted unions politically aligned with the West. The Tunisian government, Meany argued, had recently taken forcible control over the UGTT in contravention of “free” trade union ideals and in a manner that was “identical with that of the so-called peoples’ democracies [i.e., socialist states] whose false concepts we reject unequivocally.”

Therefore, Meany concluded, despite the AFL-CIO being the UGTT’s closest and most consequential international ally over the previous two decades, the US labor federation would officially boycott the twentieth anniversary celebration.Footnote 1

The breakdown in the relationship between the UGTT and AFL-CIO, symbolized by Meany’s rejection letter, highlights the unresolved tensions between the politics of Cold War anti-communism, the purported ideals of liberal democracy, and the urgency of economic development in postcolonial states. Tunisian trade unions had been at the forefront of the struggle for independence from France during the early years of the Cold War, and—despite their brief association with the Soviet-tied World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)—nationalist labor leaders had ultimately calculated that aligning with the Western, anti-communist union movement led by the AFL-CIO would be the wisest path to victory. For their part, US labor officials held up the UGTT as a paragon of “free” trade unionism and a model for the rest of the Third World because it eschewed communism and consistently allied with the West on the international stage.

Nevertheless, the Tunisian trade union center was never exactly “free” in the sense of being a fully autonomous entity in a capitalist pluralist society, as it had always been entwined with the nationalist political party that dominated the country after independence. But as Tunisia gradually adopted state-led economic development, the UGTT fell under more direct and blatant government control, a process that disturbed the AFL-CIO’s anti-communist leaders to the point of terminating their close alliance with Tunisian unions.

The history of the UGTT’s relationship with US labor and the wider international “free” trade union movement between the 1940s and 1960s demonstrates both the opportunities and challenges that the Cold War presented to Third World workers’ organizations in the era of decolonization.

At the height of its strength in the mid-twentieth century, the US labor movement was led by men who had successfully battled communists for control of their own unions and who were convinced that the postwar, US-managed international order was beneficial to American industrial workers. They were therefore staunch cold warriors. Worried that Western European governments stubbornly trying to hold onto their colonial possessions would drive the frustrated masses of Africa and Asia into the arms of the Soviets or Chinese, AFL-CIO officials used their political clout to support national liberation movements. But critically, they only backed such movements that disavowed state socialism and anti-Westernism, and were instead willing to integrate their national economies into the US-centered capitalist world market. In this, American labor leaders imitated their Cold War counterparts in the US government, who, in the words of Max Ajl and Divya Sharma, “sought to prevent decolonising states from converting political liberation to economic liberation through internally-articulated and sovereign development.”Footnote 2

Just as Washington often disingenuously preached democracy and development to justify its anti-communist “containment” policies in the early Cold War decades, AFL-CIO leaders invoked the need to spread and defend “free” trade unionism around the world as they became complicit in numerous US imperial interventions, wars, and military coups, especially in Latin America and Vietnam.Footnote 3 But it is sometimes overlooked how US labor officials showed far more flexibility when it came to their relations with African trade unions.Footnote 4 Though motivated by a wish to deny the Soviets a foothold in the continent, AFL-CIO leaders were also careful not to be too ideologically rigid for fear of inadvertently pushing African workers toward neutralism or into the communist camp. They were thus willing to tolerate African governments and labor organizations that did not conform to the ideals of liberal democracy, as long as they signaled allegiance to the West.

Although this betrays a certain cynicism behind the concept of “free” trade unionism, examining the relationship between the AFL-CIO and UGTT reveals that US labor officials had limits to how flexible they would be in Africa, at least when it came to a trade union center they had long considered their most stalwart ally on the continent. It further shows how, in Tunisia, “free” trade unionism defied a simple definition because of the UGTT’s self-perception as both an independent workers’ organization and an instrument for national liberation and state-building.

While US labor’s political support could be helpful to nationalist movements like the one in Tunisia in formally ousting their colonial rulers, it proved to be more problematic when it came to the post-independence goal of economic development, which often required adopting state planning and the nationalization of industries—policies that to the AFL-CIO were uncomfortably reminiscent of communism. As a crucial player in Tunisia’s nationalist movement, the UGTT struggled to overcome this contradiction, which was especially difficult because its leaders had been so successful in the preceding years at incorporating themselves into the Western “free” trade union movement.

Trade unions and Tunisia’s liberation struggle

Near the end of World War II, Tunisian workers organized vigorously to grow the national trade union movement. Emerging as the leader of this grassroots effort was Farhat Hached, a young unionist who had begun his labor movement career organizing transport workers in Sfax on behalf of the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)’s Tunisia branch. Frustrated by the systemic inequalities between French and native Tunisian workers, in 1944 Hached broke from the CGT to form new, nationalist-oriented unions. In January 1946, he and his allies founded the UGTT, a unified trade union center aligned with the nationalist Neo-Destour party.Footnote 5

Serving as the UGTT’s first secretary general, Hached encouraged union members to join Neo-Destour, creating a major working-class constituency within the party. In August 1947, the new trade union center staged a general strike across the protectorate in support of Neo-Destour’s demand for Tunisia’s political autonomy. During the work stoppage, French police fired live rounds into a crowd of picketers in Sfax, killing 29 people and injuring 150 more. As historian Kenneth Perkins notes, “the audacity of the 1947 general strike propelled the UGTT into the vanguard of opposition to French rule.”Footnote 6

At the UGTT’s founding conference in 1946, the decision was made to pursue affiliation with the WFTU, a recently established international body of trade union centers in the Allied nations. At the time, although the fragile antifascist alliance between the United States and Soviet Union was beginning to erode, the Cold War was not yet an explicit reality. While including communist-led labor organizations like the Soviet All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, the WFTU also consisted of several Western, noncommunist union centers such as the United States’ CIO and Britain’s Trades Union Congress. Hached and the UGTT’s other founders, along with Neo-Destour leader Habib Bourguiba, hoped that by affiliating with a global labor body like the WFTU, they could secure international allies for the Tunisian liberation struggle.Footnote 7

But matters were complicated by the fact that the French CGT and its communist leaders—who were then part of France’s government and preoccupied with postwar economic recovery—held considerable sway in the WFTU. As a precondition for joining the WFTU, Hached’s trade union center was pressured to merge with the CGT’s Tunisia branch, the Union Syndicale des Travailleurs de Tunisie (USTT), in the name of labor unity. Although the UGTT and smaller USTT occasionally supported one another’s workplace struggles, mutual acrimony between their leaders and Hached’s distrust of communists prevented such a merger, thus delaying the UGTT’s acceptance into the WFTU.Footnote 8

At the same time, the Cold War was coming into sharper focus. Washington planners increasingly viewed the Soviet Union and world communism as obstacles to their goal of establishing a postwar, US-managed international capitalist order and launched the Marshall Plan in 1947 as an instrument of anti-communist “containment.”Footnote 9

After three years of wrangling, the UGTT was admitted into the WFTU on its own terms. The decision came just days after the CIO, Trades Union Congress, and other noncommunist labor federations formally withdrew from the WFTU due largely to disagreements over the Marshall Plan, effectively splitting the international labor movement along the newly drawn Cold War battle lines.Footnote 10 Now suddenly more isolated, the WFTU’s Soviet-aligned leaders gave up trying to get the UGTT to merge with its smaller, communist-led counterpart and quickly welcomed it into the fold.Footnote 11 Meanwhile, the pro-West, anti-communist trade unions of the world came together at the end of 1949 to found the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) to rival the pro-Soviet WFTU.Footnote 12

Driving the WFTU split and subsequent creation of the ICFTU was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the older of the two US trade union centers. Unlike the leaders of the younger and more progressive CIO, who had tolerated the presence of communists within their ranks and gladly joined the WFTU in 1945, the heads of the AFL were obsessively anti-communist and had boycotted the WFTU from the start because of its inclusion of communist-led trade unions. Partnering with the US State Department and eventually also the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the late 1940s the AFL began sending representatives to Western Europe, Latin America, and Asia to encourage trade union divisions between communists and anti-communists. In France, AFL international representative and covert CIA agent Irving Brown helped provoke a split within the communist-led CGT, leading to the 1948 establishment of a new anti-communist, pro-US trade union center: Force Ouvrière.Footnote 13

In this shifting context, Hached and some of the UGTT’s other leaders feared that continuing to associate with the Soviet-allied WFTU would only harm the cause of Tunisian independence by allowing France to paint the liberation movement as a communist plot. In July 1950, after much deliberation, the UGTT pulled out of the WFTU. Over the next several months, leaders of the Tunisian trade union center debated whether to join the new, anti-communist ICFTU, with their chief concern being whether or not affiliation would help the nationalist cause. There were doubts about this because of the presence of France’s Force Ouvrière in the International, similar to the previous complications related to the CGT’s influence within the WFTU.Footnote 14

It was ultimately the anti-colonial positions of the two US labor federations, the AFL and CIO, that convinced UGTT leaders to join the ICFTU in March 1951—a move celebrated by the International as “another heavy blow to the discredited WFTU.”Footnote 15 As Hached told French journalist Albert-Paul Lentin, jumping from the WFTU to the ICFTU was a strategic rather than ideological maneuver. “It is not intended to say that we prefer the capitalist regime to the socialist,” Hached explained, “but it signifies that being geographically placed in the Western camp – whether we like it or not – we Tunisians feel that it is the leader of this camp, the USA, that by its pressure on France can aid us best in our battle for independence of our little country.”Footnote 16

Hached made his first visit to the United States in September 1951 and spoke at the AFL’s annual convention in San Francisco, accompanied by Neo-Destour’s Bourguiba. Thanks to the AFL’s Irving Brown, Bourguiba delivered an address over the State Department’s Voice of America radio broadcast in which he called for an end to European control over Arab nations.Footnote 17 Meanwhile, in his speech to the AFL convention, Hached accused France of making Tunisians “suffer the worst treatment that a dictatorship has ever dared to impose on men.”Footnote 18 Three months later, France suspended Tunisia’s Grand Council, the consultative body that ostensibly represented the Tunisian people in home rule negotiations. The UGTT responded by calling a three-day general strike. Soon after, in January 1952, French authorities arrested several Neo-Destour leaders, including Bourguiba, while colonial police opened fire on crowds of demonstrators, killing and wounding scores of civilians.Footnote 19

After the arrests, Hached emerged as the de facto leader of the nationalist movement, demonstrating the UGTT’s central role in the anti-colonial struggle. The fifty-six-thousand-member trade union center held multiple general strikes and mass demonstrations over the next several months to protest the repression, demand independence, and ensure Neo-Destour still had a voice in the streets.Footnote 20 In retaliation, colonial authorities arrested thousands of trade unionists and banned union meetings.

Hached, whose international profile gave him a measure of protection, made plans to travel to Brussels in March 1952 to attend an ICFTU meeting. Though initially denied an exit visa, he was granted one only after ICFTU general secretary J.H. Oldenbroek complained to French officials.Footnote 21 Immediately after his visit to Brussels, Hached travelled on to the United States that April to ask the AFL and CIO to push Washington to take up the question of Tunisian independence at the United Nations Security Council. Strategically, he made his case through the language of Cold War anti-communism.

Warning that a “passive attitude” by the United States would only embolden “the unified forces of colonialism and Communism,” Hached told his US allies that left unchecked, continued French repression risked destroying the UGTT, a disaster that “would definitely throw the popular [Tunisian] masses into the arms of Communism.”Footnote 22 Despite all the attacks it suffered at the hands of the French, Hached reminded an audience of American unionists that “the Tunisian National Movement is neither Communist, anti-foreign, anti-western, fanatical or feudal.”Footnote 23 In a letter to the ICFTU and AFL, Tunisian labor representative Mahmoud Messadi similarly boasted that the UGTT was keeping local communists at the margins of the national liberation struggle. “Communists or fellow travellers [sic] have pestered us demanding the creation of a national front for the struggle against repression,” Messadi wrote. “We have once more rejected the offer.”Footnote 24

For their part, US labor leaders framed their support for Tunisian independence and the UGTT as part of the Cold War. For example, after French troops violently broke a strike of Tunisian workers in the town of Enfidaville (Enfidha) in 1950, the AFL’s Brown—who witnessed the crackdown firsthand while visiting on an ICFTU delegationFootnote 25 —declared that “if one adopts the method of Enfidaville, there is no better way to push the Tunisian working class, and also the Tunisian people, toward Communism.”Footnote 26 On the occasion of Hached’s visit in April 1952, the presidents of the AFL and CIO issued a rare joint statement explaining that “we are helping the Tunisian trade unionists because their struggle against brutal colonialism is as much ours as the struggle of the oppressed workers behind the Iron Curtain against communism.” The influential heads of the two labor federations called on France to “grant the Tunisian people genuine home rule so that they can be mobilized for the struggle against Communist aggression and despotism.”Footnote 27

Meanwhile, under pressure from its fellow ICFTU affiliates (especially the AFL and CIO), France’s Force Ouvrière tepidly supported a transition to Tunisian home rule. “Internal autonomy is the goal towards which all our efforts must quickly tend,” read a motion passed at Force Ouvrière’s 1952 national congress. But elaborating that “any political change not accompanied by substantial social reforms would constitute a danger” to Tunisian workers, the measure called for “the time necessary for the implementation” of such “bold reforms,” including laying the groundwork for industrialization. The motion failed to squarely condemn French repression in the protectorate, instead vaguely denouncing “all the abuses committed on Tunisian territory by one or other of the parties involved.”Footnote 28

The UGTT’s alliance with US labor officials and the ICFTU clearly worried French authorities, as evidenced by their move to confiscate Hached’s passport upon his return home in late April 1952. The pro-colonial press now regularly vilified Hached, who started receiving death threats from French settlers, particularly from the terrorist group La Main Rouge. On December 1, colonial officials denied the UGTT leader’s request for an exit visa so he could attend an ICFTU executive board meeting in New York. Then, on the morning of December 5, while driving from a friend’s house in Radès to the union office in Tunis, he was stopped by a roadblock and machine gunned by La Main Rouge hitmen waiting in a nearby car. After Hached stumbled out of his vehicle with several gunshot wounds, his assailants dragged him into their car, bludgeoned him to death, then dumped his body in a ditch on the side of the road.Footnote 29

Hached’s brutal assassination sent shockwaves across French North Africa. He became an instant martyr to the anti-colonial cause. The UGTT declared a three-day general strike, and trade unionists in Morocco and Algeria also staged strikes in the days after the murder to protest French rule. Casablanca was rocked by an uprising on December 7 and 8, which French troops violently put down by killing at least forty Moroccans and arresting thousands more.Footnote 30

In the United States, the significance of Hached’s death was explained in Cold War terms. The day after the assassination, AFL president George Meany bemoaned that Hached’s murder would be “a Godsend to the Kremlin.” Blaming the killing on French intransigence, Meany declared that “the gates of North Africa have thus been opened wide to Communist subversion, chaos, and counter-violence.”Footnote 31 An editorial in The New Leader, a liberal anti-communist magazine in the United States, eulogized Hached as “a dedicated anti-Communist and a powerful counteracting force to Communism whose passing leaves a dangerous vacuum the Kremlin will surely wish to exploit to Tunisia’s and France’s disadvantage.”Footnote 32

The ICFTU responded to Hached’s assassination by coming out in support of full independence for Tunisia, regularly lambasting French policy in the press and at meetings of the International Labor Organization over the next few years. At the ICFTU’s urging, Force Ouvrière leaders signed a joint statement with the UGTT calling for a negotiated end to French rule.Footnote 33 Meanwhile, armed Tunisian fighters—many of them unemployed men with ties to the UGTT, but mostly dispossessed farmers—launched an anti-colonial guerilla insurgency.

Facing international pressure from the ICFTU and American labor leaders, as well as an armed rebellion in Tunisia (while simultaneously losing control of Indochina half a world away), in 1954–1955, the French government finally negotiated a process with Bourguiba that would give Tunisia internal autonomy, and ultimately independence. As part of the deal, Tunisia would remain loyal to the pro-Western camp.Footnote 34 But during the transition to independence, Bourguiba’s continued leadership of the nationalist movement was challenged by Salah Ben Youssef, a popular Neo-Destour official who decried the accord with France as a sellout and sought to take Tunisia in a pan-Arabist and neutralist direction.Footnote 35

With the conflict temporarily throwing Neo-Destour into disarray, the well-organized UGTT emerged as a power broker. In exchange for assurances that he would back their economic demands after independence, UGTT unionists used their considerable influence to shore up support for Bourguiba at Neo-Destour’s November 1955 congress in Sfax. Ben Youssef, meanwhile, was expelled from the party, led a failed armed uprising (which Bourguiba quickly crushed with the assistance of French troops), fled the country, and was assassinated in Germany.Footnote 36

Upon Tunisia’s full independence in March 1956, Meany, now serving as president of the recently merged AFL-CIO, wired Bourguiba with a message of congratulations, declaring that “Farhat Hached and the other Tunisian martyrs did not die in vain.”Footnote 37 Later that year, Irving Brown and the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer were welcomed to the UGTT’s annual convention as guests of honor and seated next to Bourguiba—whose presence at the union gathering was taken for granted despite him not being a trade unionist.Footnote 38

The UGTT and economic development

After the defeat of Ben Youssef’s short rebellion, Neo-Destour gained control of Tunisia’s newly independent government in 1956, with Bourguiba elected prime minister (he would become president a year later). The UGTT, which by now had grown to 150,000 members, would play an important role in the new government. Four UGTT officers were on Tunisia’s first post-independence Cabinet. Members of the trade union center were also elected to a quarter of all seats on the Constituent Assembly, which was tasked with drafting a new constitution.Footnote 39

Eight out of the ten members of the UGTT’s executive bureau at this time came from public sector unions, including those representing postal and telegraph workers, teachers, and public works employees. Eager to show the world that Tunisians could administer state functions without European oversight, they believed that just as the UGTT had served the national liberation cause, it should now take a leading role in building the postcolonial state by advocating expansion of the public sector. But as historian Abdelessem Ben Hammida argues, this would ultimately undermine the Tunisian labor movement’s autonomy, since serving the state meant “restricting the scope of trade union action and precluding the toleration of any potential [independent] union power.”Footnote 40

As with all postcolonial countries, Tunisia’s most urgent priority was economic development. Convinced they would need to attract foreign capital to finance industrialization, and wanting to remain on friendly terms with the capitalist West, Bourguiba and other Neo-Destour leaders initially embraced a liberal economic policy. But some important figures in the party, including UGTT secretary general Ahmed Ben Salah, believed that a planned economy would be necessary for Tunisia to definitively throw off the shackles of colonialism.Footnote 41 A French-educated intellectual and former teacher, Ben Salah saw the UGTT’s main function as advancing the country’s development through an equal partnership—or “organic fusion”—between the trade unions and Neo-Destour party.Footnote 42

At the UGTT’s sixth congress in September 1956, the delegates adopted an economic report by Ben Salah laying out the trade union center’s own development program for Tunisia. “We believe that our society, which has liberated itself from a colonialist political regime, will only truly be free if it destroys the economic and social scaffolding created by that regime,” the document began. Accusing Tunisia’s new government of exhibiting “timidity in the face of economic problems” and taking orders from the country’s “grande bourgeoisie,” the report claimed to express “not only the aspiration of the workers for a true social democracy, but also the desire of the entire Tunisian people for the government to put an effective economic policy into action.”Footnote 43

The report specifically called on the government to partner with the UGTT in establishing agricultural cooperatives, mobilizing human resources, blocking capital transfers abroad, and—perhaps most controversially—nationalizing privately owned companies.Footnote 44 “We must look ahead to an ever-growing role of the publicly owned sector and we must insist on the uncontestable right of the State to acquire any industrial enterprise when the public interest demands it,” the document announced.Footnote 45

Despite criticizing the government’s liberal economic policies and boldly presenting an alternative vision, Ben Salah’s aim was not to break with Bourguiba but to convince him to adopt a different agenda. But the Neo-Destour leader, desperate to consolidate his political power after independence, did not appreciate this open challenge. Needing the support of large landowners, he spurned talk of class conflict in favor of a rhetoric of national unity.Footnote 46 Bourguiba accused Ben Salah of “lean[ing] towards communistic thinking” and of wanting to take “our trade unions into a class struggle … with the far-sighted goal of destroying capitalism.”Footnote 47

In the United States, the AFL-CIO’s anti-communists were alarmed by Ben Salah’s proposal. Someone in the US labor federation’s International Affairs Department, possibly Irving Brown, penned an anonymous memorandum analyzing the report. “It aims at the destruction of ‘capitalism’ … [and] is characterized as an instrument of ‘socialization,’” the memo explained. While conceding that “a certain measure of economic planning” was needed in “underdeveloped countries” like Tunisia, the memo’s author warned that “without proper safeguards a rigidly centralized planned economy may become a threat to democracy, as witnessed in the Communist countries.” The unnamed AFL-CIO official further pointed out, with noticeable disappointment, that “neither in the Economic Report nor in the resolutions adopted by the [UGTT] Convention is there any mention of democracy or the danger of Communism.”Footnote 48

UGTT official Habib Achour, an old comrade of Farhat Hached, was also disturbed by Ben Salah’s economic report. Representing blue-collar workers from mines, ports, and railways, Achour believed unions should focus on workers’ day-to-day issues rather than try to steer social and economic development. Rebuking Ben Salah, in October 1956, he led roughly one-third of the UGTT’s membership out of the organization to establish a new, rival trade union center called the Union Tunisienne du Travail. This move was encouraged (and possibly engineered) by Bourguiba, who saw the split as a way to isolate Ben Salah and bring the labor movement back in line.Footnote 49

Calling for labor unity in Tunisia, the ICFTU refused to recognize the new organization and expressed indignation at Achour’s “irresponsible and anti-trade union attitude,” with its general secretary Oldenbroek saying “the splinter-group stains [Hached’s] memory by trying to destroy his work.” Achour in turn criticized the International’s “ill-timed intervention in a strictly internal matter” and claimed that the new Union Tunisienne du Travail aimed to restore Hached’s tradition of “dignity, cleanliness and purity” to the Tunisian labor movement.Footnote 50 The ICFTU tried to persuade the AFL-CIO to also speak out against the split, but US labor officials like Brown remained silent, likely because they quietly supported any move that might undermine Ben Salah and his calls for state planning.Footnote 51

Indeed, feeling pressured after the splintering of the UGTT, Ben Salah resigned as its secretary general in December 1956. He was replaced by Ahmed Tlili, a former postal clerk who did not believe in pushing the government to adopt statist economic policies. Neo-Destour now sponsored a reunification of the labor movement, and in summer 1957, Achour’s breakaway organization was folded back into the UGTT.Footnote 52 The big winner of this affair was Bourguiba, who had defused Ben Salah’s challenge and emerged more powerful than the trade union center.Footnote 53

Tlili, the reunified UGTT’s new leader, was primarily concerned with fostering democratic governance in Tunisia. “We consider dictatorship, even that of the proletariat … as being incompatible with the movement of humanity toward well-being, justice, and peace,” he declared at the UGTT’s 1960 congress.Footnote 54 While working hard to endear himself to the West, particularly through active participation in the ICFTU, he was also Tunisia’s main liaison to the Algerian independence struggle, helping funnel weapons to the Front de Libération Nationale. Although he accepted Neo-Destour’s one-party rule, Tlili also hoped to widen space for dissent and debate within the party.Footnote 55

With Ben Salah’s ouster, the UGTT became unmistakably subordinate to Neo-Destour and the Tunisian state under Bourguiba. But with Tlili at the helm, the trade union center maintained a measure of autonomy through what it called a policy of “creative cooperation” with the government based on “mutual understanding.”Footnote 56 In exchange for the UGTT muting demands for wage increases and restraining workplace militancy, for example, over the next few years Bourguiba established social security, national health insurance, and a public education system, while also passing progressive legislation enshrining women’s rights.Footnote 57

Meanwhile, despite its increasing subservience to Bourguiba, the UGTT became an even more crucial ally of the AFL-CIO and the Western “free” trade union movement in the early 1960s due to shifting Cold War geopolitics in Africa. Beginning in 1959, left-wing anti-colonial leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sekou Touré called on Africa’s trade unions to break from the West and instead adopt Cold War neutralism and Pan-Africanism. Accordingly, several African trade union centers disaffiliated from the European-dominated ICFTU in the early 1960s and formed an anti-Western, communist-friendly organization of their own called the All-African Trade Union Federation.Footnote 58

To American anti-communists, trade unions in the emergent Third World were critical to promoting the requisite economic growth and political stability to ward off communism. “In many countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America trade unions are almost the only organized force in direct contact with the people,” George C. Lodge, a US diplomat and cold warrior, wrote in 1962. “They are primary targets for Communist control. And they are, at the same time, the first line of defense against communism and other forms of totalitarianism.”Footnote 59 The AFL-CIO’s anti-communist internationalists, who operated in the same political milieu as Lodge, were thus eager to keep worker organizations in Africa like the UGTT within their sphere of influence. The All-African Trade Union Federation, with its calls to break from the West, threatened this goal.

The UGTT’s Tlili regarded the All-African Trade Union Federation as a communist front and criticized it for pushing disaffiliation from the ICFTU. Alongside other pro-Western African labor leaders like Kenya’s Tom Mboya, Tlili refused to break from the ICFTU and instead helped found the African Trade Union Confederation in early 1962. This organization, which included ICFTU-affiliated trade union centers from twenty-seven African states and colonies, promoted the idea that Pan-African unity need not be anti-Western.Footnote 60

Under Tlili’s leadership, Tunisian labor further burnished its “free” trade union credentials by stepping in as a substitute for state-managed development. The UGTT founded its own bank, built low-cost worker housing around the country, trained workers in skills needed for new industries, and—most significantly—established a network of producer, consumer, and service cooperatives that employed 2400 workers by 1960. UGTT cooperatives owned apparel, hardware, and furniture factories; trucks for distributing union-made products; retail outlets for selling such products; fishing boats; commuter buses; hotels; bakeries; printing presses; and more.Footnote 61

In the United States, these UGTT activities were praised by the diplomat Lodge. “The union has not siphoned off funds for economic development,” he wrote. “It has instead used its organization and structure to contribute to general social development. It has done for its members things which otherwise government would have had to do.”Footnote 62 As such, Lodge argued that the UGTT could serve as a noncommunist, pro-West model for organized labor in the rest of the developing world. He cheerfully proclaimed the Tunisian trade union center as “possibly the strongest organization of workers on the continent of Africa.” What’s more, owning and operating this robust network of cooperatives reinforced the trade union center’s otherwise diminished independence, which Lodge pointed out by opining that “the day may be soon approaching when the government will need the UGTT more than the UGTT now needs the government.”Footnote 63

Confrontation

French capital flight and lack of investment from the Tunisian bourgeoisie served to stymie Bourguiba’s economic development policy of relying on private initiative, with growth and industrialization remaining elusive.Footnote 64 Meanwhile, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was gaining popularity across the Arab world in part because of his state-led development program, which included nationalizing the Suez Canal. With all of this threatening his continued political legitimacy, in 1961 the Tunisian president finally decided to embrace economic planning in the hopes it would be a more effective development model. Ben Salah, who had been forced to resign as UGTT secretary general five years earlier, was now appointed minister of finance and national planning. In this new role, he put forward a ten-year plan with the aim of raising living standards and creating a more equitable distribution of income.Footnote 65

Ben Salah’s top priority was modernizing Tunisian agriculture by acquiring 500,000 hectares of private farmlands and establishing rural cooperatives on them. The expectation was that these new government-managed cooperatives would introduce modern agricultural techniques and thus generate crop surpluses for exports, which in turn would fund industrialization.Footnote 66 Signaling its new political and economic orientation, in 1964 the Neo-Destour party was renamed the Socialist Destourian party and moved to tighten its grip on Tunisian civil society organizations—including the UGTT.Footnote 67

Tlili, who preferred a liberal, mixed economy, was uneasy with the government’s ten-year plan, which he complained had been “adopted without any previous debate.”Footnote 68 In line with their efforts to nationalize the economy and assert more control over Tunisian society, Bourguiba and Ben Salah increasingly meddled in the UGTT’s internal activities, ensuring Tlili was voted out as secretary general in 1963 (though he would remain in a more marginalized position on the UGTT’s executive bureau). As Lodge had predicted, through its cooperatives, the Tunisian trade union center started appearing less dependent on the state, and Bourguiba aimed to curb this trend by imposing more onerous regulations over the co-ops.Footnote 69

The latent conflict between Bourguiba and UGTT leadership exploded in 1964, when Tunisia devalued its currency (the dinar) by twenty-five percent in exchange for a loan from the International Monetary Fund.Footnote 70 The devaluation led to a dramatic loss of purchasing power for the country’s working class. Confronted by a cost-of-living crisis, the UGTT’s new secretary general, Habib Achour—who had led the brief union split in late 1956—abandoned the traditional restraint on wage demands and publicly called for significant pay raises. “A hungry man cannot be productive,” Achour said in a defiant speech on May Day, 1965. “That is why we consider the demand for an increase in wages as being identical with the demand for increasing productivity.” Regarding this as a betrayal of his insistence on national unity, Bourguiba had the speech censored in the press.Footnote 71

Soon after, in June, Achour was thrown in jail and formally removed as UGTT secretary general. The government charged him with malfeasance related to a fatal accident on a boat that belonged to a union-owned tourism cooperative, but Tlili and others alleged this was merely a pretext for Bourguiba to seize total control over the UGTT and make an example of anyone who stood in his way. Indeed, that July the president installed party loyalists onto the UGTT executive bureau while dismissing anyone who criticized his policies, including Tlili.

As this unfolded, the ICFTU was set to open its world congress in Amsterdam. Tlili, a fixture at such gatherings, arrived in Amsterdam at almost the exact moment he was being stripped of his UGTT title back home. Bourguiba dispatched two handpicked delegates to represent Tunisian labor at the congress instead of Tlili.

ICFTU leaders suddenly had a difficult decision to make: They could either seat Tlili and turn away Bourguiba’s representatives, which might provoke the Tunisian president into having the UGTT disaffiliate from the International, as many other African trade union centers had recently done, or they could seat Bourguiba’s loyalists and deny Tlili’s credentials, which would effectively be compromising their stated principle of “free” and autonomous trade unionism. After a tense debate, the ICFTU executive board voted fifteen to seven to recognize Bourguiba’s handpicked delegates instead of Tlili. AFL-CIO president Meany was the most vocal advocate of the pro-Tlili position. After losing the vote, he demanded the ICFTU at least investigate the situation in Tunisia.Footnote 72

Accordingly, two weeks after the Amsterdam gathering, a delegation was dispatched to Tunis that included ICFTU general secretary Omer Becu and Swiss trade union leader Giacomo Bernasconi. The visitors attended a special UGTT congress that had been quickly called by the government after Achour’s detention. There, the Tunisian president gave a two-hour speech in which he claimed the arrest of Achour was not political, but at same time, according to a Swiss journalist accompanying Bernasconi, he “made it abundantly clear that the crime of which the all-too-popular labor leader had been guilty was mainly his opposition to the economic and wage policies of the government following the devaluation of the dinar.”Footnote 73

The ICFTU delegation had planned to visit Achour in jail, but he was released shortly before their arrival, though he would remain under house arrest. After speaking directly with the Tunisian president, Becu announced that the ICFTU would not interfere in the country’s internal politics, especially because Achour’s arrest was—officially, at least—unrelated to his union activities (nevertheless, the ICFTU would pay for Achour’s legal defenseFootnote 74). In return, the UGTT’s newly installed leaders voted to remain in the ICFTU.Footnote 75

Meany was horrified by these developments. Rather than take the more accommodating approach of Becu, the AFL-CIO president cabled Bourguiba on July 3 urging him “to desist from any action against independence of UGTT and freedom of its leadership.” Meany continued, “Such action by your government would be gravely detrimental to the democratic policies which have earned Tunisia worldwide respect and would jeopardize the esteem in which you and the people of your country are held by your long time friends of the American trade union movement.”Footnote 76

A few weeks later, Meany wrote to US Secretary of State Dean Rusk to warn that by “eliminating the present democratically elected leadership” of the UGTT and “foisting upon it a puppet leadership,” Bourguiba was only serving “the enemies of democracy and other totalitarian forces throughout the African continent.” Meany urged Washington to “make its disapproval of these acts known to President Bourguiba.”Footnote 77 But Rusk and others in the State Department viewed Bourguiba as a solid ally and a bulwark against the regional influence of the Soviet-allied Nasser. Washington took no heed of Meany’s warnings and continued supplying Tunisia with generous economic and military aid.Footnote 78

That September, the AFL-CIO’s international organ, the Free Trade Union News, published an article by Tlili entitled “Tunisian Tragedy: Bourguiba Crushes Free Unions.” Now living in self-imposed exile, Tlili alleged that the UGTT was being forcibly transformed into an arm of the state in violation of “free” trade union principles. He also criticized the ICFTU delegation to Tunis for allegedly showing insufficient concern for Achour.Footnote 79

Béchir Bellagha, the UGTT’s newly installed, pro-Bourguiba secretary general, wrote to the AFL-CIO to register his dissatisfaction with the publication of Tlili’s scathing article. Bellagha rebutted Tlili by arguing that, in fact, the UGTT had always subordinated itself to the party and was thus not a “free” trade union in the American sense. “The UGTT has never been…but a component – indeed a very important one, if not the most important – of the National Front around a liberation political force, the Neo-Destour, to achieve common goals,” he wrote. After all, Bellagha added, UGTT founder Farhat Hached had been martyred for the cause of national liberation, not trade union autonomy. What’s more, he argued, it had long been the case that Tunisian union leaders simultaneously served as party functionaries and government officials. Therefore, Bourguiba’s recent intervention in the UGTT’s affairs was merely the latest manifestation of an ongoing “process of osmosis which has been existing between the Party and the Trade-Unions since the first day of their existence.”Footnote 80

In late January 1966, days after a Tunisian court sentenced Achour to three months in prison over the boat accident, the UGTT held a celebration to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its founding. ICFTU officials attended, but the AFL-CIO refused to send any representatives despite being invited, demonstrating the deterioration of what was once a warm relationship. “Some people abroad, such as Mr. Meany, refuse to respect the authority of our state and the decisions of our tribunals,” Bourguiba declared in a speech at the anniversary party. He warned US labor to stop interfering in his country’s trade union affairs, adding that it was “ridiculous” to compare Tunisia to the one-party dictatorships of Africa and Asia. “Stability in Tunisia is not the stability of the Army, of spies, or of secret police,” Bourguiba said. “It is one which rests on a spirit of honesty and fairness.”Footnote 81

Conclusion

Though they had always been part of a nationalist and state-building project, many UGTT officials also believed in the principle of union autonomy and having an independent political voice. This would inevitably put them in conflict with the Tunisian government in the mid-1960s as the exigencies of development collided with union demands, a conflict the government would win by imposing direct control over the UGTT. Despite being relatively patient and flexible in Africa on questions of liberal democracy and pluralism, AFL-CIO leaders like Meany found it especially difficult to accept this outcome in Tunisia precisely because the UGTT had come to be seen as “a fortress of the free trade union movement in Africa.”Footnote 82

Examining Tunisian labor’s international relations between the late 1940s and mid-1960s serves to highlight both the opportunism and vacuousness of the Cold War notion of “free” trade unionism. The concept was useful for AFL-CIO officials in attacking anti-Western labor movements and advancing anti-communist “containment,” and was also helpful for the UGTT in securing Western legitimacy for the Tunisian liberation struggle. But after independence was won, “free” trade union ideals were little help to the UGTT in navigating its relationship with a nationalist government eager to shore up political power and deliver on promises of modernization. Still, despite the hollowness of “free” trade unionism, this history also reveals the limits to how much state interference in trade union affairs the AFL-CIO’s anti-communist leaders were willing to accept, even among their most valued Cold War allies.

Competing interests

The author declares none.