WORLD LABOUR FEDERATION

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25705, 18 January 1949, Page 7

WORLD LABOUR FEDERATION

RUSSIANS ASK FOR “CONCILIATION” BRITISH PROPOSAL TO I SUSPEND EXECUTIVE “The Soviet executive S of' T the "wTorld Federation of Trade Unions .has asked for 'conciliation talks to be held before the federation's Executive Bureau meets to-morrow, in an effort to avoid a British-American move that might split the organisation," says Reuter’s correspondent. “A soviet member, Mr Vassily Kuznetsov. proposed a copferenca after a British proposal seeking the suspension of fhe federation's Executive Bureau for one year. “Mr Arthur Deakin (Britain), who is president of the federation, and is also a member of the executive of the British Trades Union Congress, said; ‘We are certainly going ahead with our proposal. We have tho American Congress of Industrial Organisations behind us.'" “Through Labour movements in satellite countries and pro-Communist unions in France and Italy, the Russians have dominated the W.F.T.U. since it was organised after the war,” says the correspondent of the Associated Press. “Mr Kuznetsov is expected to take a conciliatory attitude in an attempt to save the organisation, and he may offer to yield much of the Communist control rather than see a new international labour group formed. The non-Communist leaders are planning such a group, and the influential American Federation of Labour. which has stayed out of the W.F.T.U., is eager to join it.”