AFL-CIO, The Solidarity Center, The NED & Imperialism

This is a Zoom event.
The AFL-CIO receives $75 million a year from the US funded National Endowment For Democracy (NED) for the operations of the “Solidarity Center”. This panel will look at the history of the NED and that role of the AFL-CIO around the world.

Speakers:
Frank Hammer has been speaking out against the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) since 1981 when his brother, Mike, was assassinated in El Salvador while working for the Institute. Frank was a Detroit GM production and skilled-trades auto worker and union activist who rose through the ranks to represent his 4,000-member UAW Local 909 as its Bargaining Chairman, Vice-President, and President, for nearly a dozen years. Before retiring in 2007, he represented GM workers for 6 years as an International Representative on the UAW-GM’s Umpire Staff. Frank was a student activist and draft resister during his undergraduate and graduate years (1961-70) at UC Berkeley and Michigan. He was born in Ecuador in 1943 to German émigré parents who fled Germany in 1933. In retirement, Frank continues his political and organizational work on domestic, international, and environmental fronts.

David Hemson established student Wages Commissions in South Africa in 1971 and participated in Durban mass strikes in 1973. Helped found textile, furniture, dock and metal unions before being house arrested in 1974. Expelled from ANC in November 1979, he was detained in Zimbabwe for organizing a workers’ party in 1985. Now active in writing labor history and supporting workers’ movements in SA, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Belarus and internationally with the Workers International Network.

Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, IN. A member of the National Writers Union, he has been working to build global labor solidarity since 1983, and has published four books and over 240 articles and book reviews in the US and in 11 different countries, mostly on workers and their organizations around the world. He authored AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010), and “The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Program: Where Historians Now Stand,” which is on-line at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol8/iss2/5.
His latest book is Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States (Lexington Books, 2021).

Lisa Milos, Member of CWA UPTE UCSF, Delegate To San Francisco Labor Council & International Activist with Chilean Labor & People

Sponsored by Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations (LEPAIO)
https://aflcio-int.education