Abstract This introduction reconceptualizes the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a pivotal arena of Cold War labour internationalism by narrating its history through the experiences of actors outside the traditional metropolitan core. It offers the first systematic synthesis of a dispersed body of scholarship on the WFTU, integrating work on communist internationalism, decolonization, gender, and trade union education into a coherent analytical framework. Methodologically, the introduction breaks new ground by adopting an actor-centred approach that foregrounds “subaltern labour leaders” from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and traces their trajectories across multiple scales, from workplaces and national centres to WFTU congresses and UN forums. Reconstructing key moments in the federation’s history, it highlights a polyphony of national internationalisms within a shared communist project and shows how struggles over gender, empire, and sovereignty intersected with, but were not reducible to, East–West bloc politics. In doing so, the introduction advances a more nuanced understanding of the WFTU as both an instrument of state socialism and a generative space for alternative visions of global labour solidarity.
Harisch et al. (Wed,) studied this question.