The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951

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.