Adventures in Free Trade: U.S. Business and Labor in the Cold War Era

This panel will explore the politics of how both U.S. business and labor organizations initially supported economic integration and freer trade in the early Cold War years, and how that support became more fraught and divisive in the 1970s and 1980s, amidst plant-closings, recession, and deindustrialization. While labor dropped its support for freer trade in the 1970s, employers pushed for ever more trade expansion. In keeping with the theme of this year’s conference, the panel reveals how individual business leaders on the one hand and labor unionists on the other engaged in associations to collaborate and to advocate collectively for common aims. It is a story fueled in part by the language of international cooperation and collaboration, as against the older, more protectionist rhetoric of competition. But it is also a story that identifies some of the bygone lost political battles that are suddenly relevant again in the age of Trump and Brexit.
Papers will be presented by Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College, Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, University of Lausanne, and Melanie Sheehan, UNC-Chapel Hill. Jennifer Delton and Janick Schaufelbuehl are listed as chairs here for the proposal, but we are open to having a chair assigned to us.