Bread, Peace & Freedom

The name of the new organization was a jawbreaker. "When I get to it," said one harassed delegate, "I just say, 'I see, after you,' and I've got it."

Last week in London, the I.C.F.T.U. (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) formally set itself up in business. In spite of some fraternal squabbles and a contest between American and British delegates for domination of the new labor international, the organization's birth pangs were relatively mild. It had managed to build the framework in which labor unions from 53 countries--including America's staid A.F.L., Britain's Socialist T.U.C. and (tentatively) the Continent's Catholic unions--could unite in their fight against Communism.

After picking Brussels as the new organization's permanent site, the congress adopted a manifesto setting forth its policies, and purposes. A committee under the C.I.O.'s Walter Reuther drafted a text which managed to please both the T.U.C. and A.F.L. The slogans adopted:

"Bread--Economic Security and Social Justice for All!"

"Freedom--through Economic and Political Democracy!"

"Peace--with Liberty, Justice and Dignity for all!"

Said the manifesto: "We assert that economic and political democracy are inseparable . . . [We call on the world's workers to] unite with us to achieve a world in which people are free from Communist, Fascist, Falangist and other forms of totalitarianism."

The new international's major concern would be "organizing the unorganized on a world basis, reorganizing the disorganized." From the Brussels headquarters organizers will go out to help infant labor movements in industrially backward countries --e.g., Korea and India. Representatives will be sent to watch labor conditions in the colonial areas of Africa. In Western Europe, I.C.F.T.U. will concentrate on the struggle to free labor unions from crippling Red infiltration.

Boss of the new organization is plump, pink-cheeked General Secretary Jacobus Hendrik Oldenbroek, 52. Born in Amsterdam, he grew up in London and Hamburg, where his father, a cigarmaker, had set up shop. Beginning work at 14, as a clerk, he moved on to trade-union journalism, eventually headed the powerful International Transport Workers' Federation. A good-natured, soft-spoken labor diplomat as well as a staunch anti-Communist and a crack administrator, Oldenbroek seemed to many outsiders to be the ideal man for the job. "We are going to be efficient, in the American sense," he said last week. "That means when you want something, you go all out, and no rest until you've got it."

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