A call to the free labor congress, an ORIT-ICFTU poster in the USIA files

An English-language congress call distributed in Mexico City, catalog date 9 November 1964, announces the sixth continental congress of the Inter-American free labor movement for 2 to 6 February 1965. It is signed ORIT and ICFTU, labor bodies, yet it sits in the U.S. Information Agency's poster files (NAID 6949359).

The call

The picture is a white radio mast standing on a map of the Americas, sending out signals drawn as lightning bolts. The text is a notice of a meeting: who is calling it, which congress, where and when.

CALL

ORIT

ICFTU

VI CONTINENTAL

CONGRESS

INTER-AMERICAN

FREE LABOR MOVEMENT

MEXICO CITY FEBRUARY 2-6, 1965

The archive holds two companion sheets with the same catalog date: a Spanish call signed ORIT and CIOSL for the "VI CONGRESO CONTINENTAL" of "SINDICALISMO LIBRE INTERAMERICANO" (NAID 6949361), and a Portuguese version (NAID 6949360). Both give the same city and the same 2 to 6 February 1965 dates.

Whose sheet is it?

On its face, the sheet belongs to ORIT and the ICFTU. The archive describes ORIT as a labor organization and the ICFTU as its parent body, and notes that the poster is signed by them and not by a government. Its file is another matter. The National Archives keeps it in Record Group 306, in the U.S. Information Agency series of posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and FRAME codes the issuer as "State."

FRAME's source category is "Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure." That is the right flag. A union member in Mexico City who read this notice saw a labor federation's name and nothing to say that a U.S. agency had a hand in putting it in front of him. The record does not say what that hand was, whether printing, distribution or both, and this page does not supply it.

What "free labor" means here

FRAME names glittering generalities as the technique. The selling phrase is "free labor," and the sheet defines it no further. There is no program, no list of demands and no named opponent. The archive codes the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance" and the theme as labor.

Unions organizing across borders under their own names is ordinary free association. The question this sheet raises is narrower: whether a government should help a foreign labor movement's publicity while leaving its own name off the notice. The USIA hub treats sheets that leave the agency's name off as a real criticism of the program. For American labor's own print battles at home, see the union and open-shop case study. More of the agency's sheets are in the USIA poster gallery.