Schedule Of Events

5:00 pm - 7:00 pm : The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, Labor, Internationalism & Trump

The Trump government and Elon Musk shutdown funding to the National Endowment For Democracy (NED) which partially funds the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. Additional funds comes from USAID and it has a yearly budget of over $70 million. The Solidarity Center has received over $1 billion from the US government for its international operations and the AFL-CIO leadership has kept it’s operations secret from the rank and file members of the union. In a successful effort to keep the funding going, the rest of the funding cycle this year, the Solidarity Center executive director Shawn Bader-Blau filed a legal brief to the Trump government about why this funding was essential to the United States. This panel will look at the role of the Solidarity Center internationally and how it has been an appendage of US imperialist operations around the world harming independent unions to overthrow governments and training pro-capitalist union officials.

Speakers:

Jeff Schurke, Professor &  and author of Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade and the upcoming book No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine
Carol Lang, Professor At CUNY & AFT PSC Delegate
Kim Scipes, Professor Retired and Author of KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980–1994 and AFL-CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Professor and managing editor of Covert Action
by LEPAIO (Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operation

Location : Online - Zoom Event