Mixed up in power politics and the Cold War: the Americans, the ICFTU and Singapore's labour movement, 1955-1960.

The Cold War divided not only international politics, but also contributed to the polarisation of the international labour movement. Created in 1945 by unions from countries such as the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) had originally aspired to unite and advance the international labour movement's cause. As Cold War tensions escalated, however, policy disagreements and opposing ideological beliefs combined to eventually split the institution, resulting in pro-western unions leaving the WFTU to found the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949. (1) Backing and working with the ICFTU, Washington acted thereafter to advance the cause of 'free labour' across the globe. (2) Among the many places where the United States intervened was Singapore. The episode has not been extensively examined. This article is an attempt to illuminate the American involvement in Singapore's labour affairs during the 1950s.

No work has studied the subject in detail. Leong Yee Fong has explored the rivalry for influence between the competing labour internationals and their backers in Malaya. The contest prompted the colonial authorities to implement policies that sought to circumscribe the influence of the pro-communist WFTU and the Malayan Communist Party on Malaya's workers. Leong's article, however, contains little focused discussion on the situation in Singapore. Also unanalysed is the specific nature of the respective Soviet and American support for the endeavours of the WFTU and ICFTU on the island. (3) If Leong neglects the Singapore side of the story, another historian has attempted to document the operations of the ICFTU on the island. Yeo Kim Wah notes the arrival of ICFTU officials in Singapore in 1950 and accentuates their plan to encourage the establishment of a confederation of noncommunist labour unions that could 'counter an expected offensive by the World Federation of Trade Unions in all colonial territories'. Yeo, however, does not develop the story into the late 1950s and makes no mention of American assistance to local non-communist unions through the ICFTU. (4) Unlike Yeo and Leong, another scholar has offered some insight into the American attempt to use the ICFTU to strengthen Singapore's non-communist unions. Jim Baker notes that 'the ICFTU funneled support to Lim Yew Hock's Trade Union Congress in the hope of stemming the leftward shift of the trade union movement'. (5) But Baker gives only fleeting attention to the American undertaking, providing no additional details on how the support was carried out. Baker's work, while laudable, also does not make extensive use of American or other archival materials to detail US government activities on the island. Nor does he examine the British and local responses to the American endeavours.

Indeed, little is known about the role that external actors such as the Americans played in Singapore's labour affairs. Scholars who have studied the history of Singapore's labour movement during the 1950s typically set it within a narrow national context. The actors are local. They are nationalists, political opportunists or subversives. And the examination of trade unionism characteristically rests on uncritical assumptions about the ideological inclination of the labour institutions and their constituencies. Conventional wisdom thus holds that labour groups of similar ideological proclivities invariably flocked together; these groups also supported the political parties that shared their assumed politics. In generating such institutional narratives, the writers expound on the politics of the unions but give short shrift to the history of the Singaporean worker or unionist. A narrow political perspective of the labour movement is thus obtained in such works. (6)

Bucking conventional trends and informed by new approaches in social history, another group of scholars has begun to pay more attention to the unionists and workers, making them the object of investigation rather than their institutions. They expose the limitations of the more conventional institutional narratives, which tend to describe labour developments, in simplistic binary terms, as a struggle between moderation and extremism. The new scholarship accentuates and renders the idealism of the unionists and the workers, and their everyday resistance to social oppression and empire in more complex narratives. Greater insights have thus been gained into the colourful lives and times of unionists Lim Chin Siong and Jamit Singh, and the labourers at the dockyard--insights that belie the extremist labels that have been pinned on them and their activities. (7)

Despite enriching the study of Singapore's labour history, the recent historiography nevertheless shares one drawback with the body of work that it seeks to qualify: its narrow focus on local actors as the sources of conflict and development within the labour movement. As noted, apart from a few limited accounts, the involvement of external actors like the Americans in Singapore's labour movement has received little extensive study from scholars of the island's history. Nor can one find published works on the subject in the literature on US-Southeast Asia relations during the 1950s. Apart from Baker's single-chapter survey of US activities in Singapore between 1945 and 1960, the scholarly literature on the American involvement in Singapore is practically non-existent. Reflecting popular interest and the availability of archival documents, publications on American interventions in Southeast Asia have focused particular attention on Washington's endeavours in countries such as Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaya, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The studies illuminate the American attempts to bolster the non-communist governments in these countries with economic and military aid. They also highlight Washington's attempts to undermine leftist regimes through covert operations. (8) Still, for all the attention that historians pay to the efforts made by American policymakers, diplomats and military officials to further US Cold War policy in Southeast Asia, organised labour's anti-communist operations in Singapore have not been fully explored. The intention of this article, then, is to begin filling the lacunae in the existing literature.

This paper examines the US involvement in Singapore's labour affairs between 1955 and 1960. It brings into sharp focus peoples and institutions other than those from Singapore who were concerned about and actively involved in the cosmopolitan island's domestic affairs. If the American cultural, diplomatic and economic presence in Singapore spans over a century, it would be during the 1950s when Cold War tensions were high that the US government intensified its activities on the island. (9) New attention to how external actors like the Americans had affected Singapore's labour affairs and how locals had reacted to the Americans can open up new avenues of debate on the US involvement in Southeast Asia. The undertaking also renders the historiography of Singapore more multifaceted, and more in conformity with the historical evidence and lived experience. Transnational flows of capital, ideas, people and products have, after all, converged on the island throughout its history, influencing domestic developments. (10) And in the US intervention, one would find the Americans, operating through the ICFTU, having a hand in shaping Singapore's labour affairs.

In arriving at that finding and in investigating American activities in Singapore, the article draws on the declassified records left behind by the very agencies and peoples that attempted to influence the island's labour developments. Documents generated by the US State Department and its diplomats, and the private papers of American labour official George Weaver who was active in Singapore, are invaluable primary sources for reconstructing in detail the US involvement in Singapore's labour affairs. Apart from illuminating the motivations and nature of the US endeavours, the archival materials, particularly the memoranda of conversations transcribed by American diplomats, also provide insight into the thoughts of Singaporeans. These memoranda contain verbatim or paraphrased notes on myriad subjects discussed in private conversations between US diplomats and numerous locals. The frank opinions advanced by discussants in the course of a tete-a-tete shed light on the views of locals toward labour developments as well as the social and political drama unfolding in Singapore during the 1950s. The candid comments rendered in the comments by a local about another local also bring into sharp focus the rough edges or the admirable strengths of a personality. In using these sources, care has been taken to account for biases. Where a description volunteered in one dialogue is consistently corroborated by others, communicated in different settings and times, the cloud of uncertainty about the veracity of the information can be more confidently lifted and the portrayal of a character verified or debunked.