After 1945 they took their crusade worldwide. The CIO had major Communist elements who played a key role in organizational work in the late 1930s and war years. By 1949 they were purged. The AFL and CIO strongly supported the Cold War policies of the Truman administration, including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. Left-wing elements in the CIO protested and were forced out of the main unions. Thus Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers purged the UAW of all Communist elements. He was active in the CIO umbrella as well, taking the lead in expelling eleven Communist-dominated unions from the CIO in 1949. As a leader of the anti-Communist center-left, Reuther was a founder of the liberal umbrella group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1949 he led the CIO delegation to the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in opposition to the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions. He had left the Socialist Party in 1939, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s was a leading spokesman for liberal interests in the CIO and in the Democratic Party. James B. Carey also helped influence the CIO's pullout from the WFTU and the formation of the ICFTU dedicated to promoting free trade and democratic unionism worldwide. Carey in 1949 had formed the IUE, a new CIO union for electrical workers, because the old one, the UE, was tightly controlled by the left. Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff argues that anti-communism was part of a strategy by big business, Republicans and conservatives to single out and destroy the members of the coalition that forced through the New Deal, namely organized labor, socialist and communist parties. Since its peak in the mid-20th century, the American labor movement has been in steady decline, with losses in the private sector larger than gains in the public sector. In the early 1950s, as the AFL and CIO merged, around a third of the American labor force was unionized; by 2012, the proportion was 11%, constituting roughly 5% in the private sector and 40% in the public sector. Organized labor's influence steadily waned and workers' collective voice in the political process has weakened. Partly as a result, wages have stagnated and income inequality has increased. "Although the National Labor Relations Act was initially a boon for unions, it also sowed the seeds of the labor movement's decline. The act enshrined the right to unionize, but the system of workplace elections it created meant that unions had to organize each new factory or firm individually rather than organize by industry.