World Federation of Trade Unions

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was established in the wake of the Second World War to bring together trade unions across the world in a single international organization, much like the United Nations. After a number of Western trade unions left it in 1949, as a result of disputes over support for the Marshall Plan, to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the WFTU was made up primarily of unions affiliated with o... more

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was established in the wake of the Second World War to bring together trade unions across the world in a single international organization, much like the United Nations. After a number of Western trade unions left it in 1949, as a result of disputes over support for the Marshall Plan, to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the WFTU was made up primarily of unions affiliated with or sympathetic to communist parties. In the context of the Cold War, the WFTU was often portrayed as a Soviet front organization.A number of those unions, including those from Yugoslavia and China, left later when their governments had ideological differences with the Soviet Union. The WFTU has declined precipitously in the past twenty years since the fall of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with many of its former constituent unions joining the ICFTU. It maintains its headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic but... less