The definitive history of the US labor movement’s complicity in Zionist settler colonialism, and a call for today’s labor militants to organize in solidarity with Palestinians.
In trying to organize their unions to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, US trade unionists are often met with arguments that the labor movement should keep quiet and remain neutral because “Palestine has nothing to do with unions” and “weighing in” only distracts from winning better working conditions. Such arguments, however, often serve as cover for top union officials who have historically been far more sympathetic to Israel and Zionism than to the cause of Palestinian liberation and self-determination.
No Neutrals There makes a timely and critical intervention by recounting the little-known history of the US labor movement’s century-long involvement in the ongoing struggle for Palestine. Scholar Jeff Schuhrke convincingly demonstrates that unions in the United States have never been silent or neutral on the question of Palestine. In fact, they have played a key role—often overlooked by historians—in the initial Zionist colonization of Palestine, in the eventual foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, in supporting US foreign policy commitments to bolster Israel’s global standing and military capabilities, and in ongoing efforts to suppress the Palestinian liberation movement.
In his compelling telling of this history, Schuhrke conclusively shows that US unions helped build and maintain the state of Israel, and also shines a light on important exceptions to this rule: instances of US labor solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle that point the way forward for today’s labor movement.
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Praise for Blue-Collar Empire:
“In Blue Collar Empire, Schuhrke, a long time labor journalist and scholar, lays out the entire disturbing history of the American labor movement’s decades of close involvement in anticommunist crusades around the world. The reality of the AFL-CIO’s ties with the Cold War, the CIA, and America’s bloody foreign policy is, I assure you, much more astounding than you might think.”
—Hamilton Nolan, author of The Hammer
“In this comprehensive and consequential study, Jeff Schuhrke sheds light on the often nefarious international agenda of the AFL-CIO. During the Cold War, as Schuhrke documents, the top leaders of the U.S. labor establishment, driven by fervent and indiscriminate anti-communism, helped sabotage nascent union movements in countries across the globe. In doing so, the AFL-CIO undermined cross-border working class unity and bolstered multinational corporate power. Blue-Collar Empire thus offers much vital information and insight, both for scholars seeking to understand the rise and decline of the 20th century labor movement, and for union activists working today to build (or re-build) international networks of solidarity.”
—Toni Gilpin, author of The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland
“In this highly readable and engaging book, Jeff Schuhrke explores the disastrous history of American labor's role bolstering U.S. imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere. He explains that Cold War anti-Communism was not the only key to the AFL-CIO's own ‘foreign policy.’ Equally crucial were the ideological linkages that put a liberal brand of industrial pluralism close to the heart of the modernization theory celebrated by the State Department and the CIA. Thus, in trying to transplant a North American version of ‘free’ collective bargaining to the oligarchic regimes of Latin America, U.S. trade unions, whether funded by the CIA or not, found themselves complicit with repressive elites that could tolerate neither left wing insurgencies nor conservative enterprise-based trade unionism.”
—Nelson Lichtenstein, author of A Fabulous Failure: the Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
“For too many years, too many unions followed the State Department like sheep, supporting lethal, union-member-killing anti-communist policies abroad in the hope of keeping at least a small seat at the table. Jeff Schuhrke’s eye-opening new book, Blue-Collar Empire, is an indispensable history of this devil’s bargain, a chilling lesson why, as a new, different kind of labor movement awakens, unions must never fight for economic justice at home while denying it to those abroad.”
—Greg Grandin, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth