The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951
Loading...
License
Cadmus Permanent Link
Full-text via DOI
ISBN
ISSN
Issue Date
Type of Publication
LC Subject Heading
Other Topic(s)
EUI Research Cluster(s)
Initial version
Published version
Succeeding version
Preceding version
Published version part
Earlier different version
Initial format
Author(s)
Citation
Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992
Cite
ROMERO, Federico, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/15212
Abstract
This book is a fresh and solidly documented study of U.S. postwar policy toward the reconstruction of European trade unions. Using Italy as a case study, Federico Romero demonstrates the weaknesses of the American strategy to reshape European societies in the likeness of American social pluralism. The United States sought postwar stability based on free trade, prosperity, and American security. In this scenario, Romero says, unions were to be independent of political parties, interested in wages, hours, and working conditions, and supportive of market capitalism. Mote precisely, the unions were to fit the AFL image, and Romero shows how the U.S. government cooperated with the AFL to support friendly anti-Communist unions. Romero exposes the shortcomings of a theory of modernization derived from the New Deal but deployed to support containment of communism. The high-wage postwar settlement in American industry could not be exported as a universal model, he concludes, because it depended on exceptional conditions enjoyed by the American economy in the 1940s and 1950s. This book is a translation of a study published in Italy in 1989 that was awarded the Walter Tobagi Prize.