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The Fractured Politics of Class Harmony: Labor Experts and Industrial Democracy in the United States and Chile, 1941-1973
Stern, Joshua
Stern, Joshua
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Thesis/Dissertation
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2025-08
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History
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https://doi.org/10.34944/br91-9g17
Abstract
In 1941, powerful US unions built a coalition to defeat fascism and push for an economic bill of rights, guaranteeing dignity for every worker in the country. Just a generation later, they viewed those same politics and goals in Chile as a communist-led ruse. This rightward shift begs questions about the transnational polarization of Cold War labor and its impact on politics in the Western Hemisphere. Why would trade union leaders, whose organizations fought against employers and the state for an emancipatory industrial democracy in the United States, actively cooperate with their government to undermine a pro-worker, democratic government in Chile? What changed between the 1940s and the 1970s? Conversely, why did a factionalized and repressed Chilean labor movement after World War II not follow the trend of US and European trade unionists? What did Chileans build instead, and did it influence the construction of a democratic socialist state?
This dissertation examines US labor intervention in Chile during the Cold War and how Chileans resisted and accommodated that intervention. The rise of a socialist government in Chile in 1970 and the right-wing coup that took that government down in 1973 are well known. Understudied until now, however, has been the role of labor experts — labor bureaucrats, industrial relations professors, and union officials — in creating the conditions for both events. From World War II to the rise of Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet, the polarization of Chilean society and politics was partly a function of US labor intervention. Labor interventionists trained thousands of Chilean workers in the ideas and practices of free trade unionism – promoting union security, fighting communism, and securing middle-class prosperity through the restriction of rank-and-file agency. But Chileans of all stripes resisted to maintain their competing vision of industrial democracy alive, setting up confrontation after confrontation. The bottom-up power of the Chilean union movement helped build the popular movements of Christian Democracy (1964–1970) ¬and the Marxist Unidad Popular government (1970–1973).
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