Opponents of unions have often portrayed them as a threat to democracy.Rather than speaking for workers, they contend, unions were a “special interest” or “third party” who took away workers’ voices, along with their hard-earned money.Reviewing labor’s post-World War II history – particularly the domestic record of the AFL-CIO since its foundation in 1955 – this chapter shows that unions were not a third party, but an important force for democracy.Throughout the post-World War II era, organized labor provided a voice for all working people, not just its members. Unions were a much-needed watchdog, consistently fighting for safer workplaces, higher pay, and workplace democracy. They also gave a stronger voice to working people in politics – and could bring them into the streets. Despite their imperfections, no other organization performed this role in quite the same way.

This chapter focuses on the strong support Poland’s Solidarity movement received from the USA’s largest trade union, the AFL-CIO. At least partly, this chapter shows, the AFL-CIO’s strong advocacy for Solidarity has to be seen within US political debates triggered by the election of Ronald Reagan. In Reagan’s rhetoric, Communist totalitarianism came to denote only the most extreme form of the general threat of the modern state to silently encroach on the lives of individuals. Even as he revived the ideological Cold War, Reagan went on to reshape the social imagery underpinning it – a change that entailed curbing the power of organized labor. Against this background, Solidarity fascinated the AFL-CIO not primarily as an anti-Communist movement, but as a trade union. As Reagan reduced the influence of trade unions, the AFL-CIO invoked Solidarity to argue that it was not human rights as such that expressed the difference between East and West, but a particular human right – freedom of association. In the United States, the chapter demonstrates, Solidarity became a contested icon in a political and intellectual struggle initiated not by different foreign policy aims – in this field, the AFL-CIO agreed with Reagan – but by a reconfiguration of the normative and conceptual world of US politics.