At the onset of colonial rule in 1881 the working class in Tunisia faced a complete lack of both political and social rights. During this era, workers were faced with several options to organize, the most prominent were cross-national communist movements and cross-class nationalist ones. This choice emerged in part from the fact that Tunisian workers, like other colonized peoples of the French empire, were extensively integrated with a broader imperial labor movement, having originally been organized as members of the metropolitan labor federation, the CGT. This poses the question of under what conditions different kinds of intersectional coalitions are possible? While Tunisia’s first national labor union in the 1920s would try to bring together these two bases of external support, from nationalists and the communist left, future efforts culminating in today’s UGTT would find this impossible. In this paper I explore the concrete factors that shaped this choice at the national and international levels, including realignments within the left, the social base of the nationalist movement, and international labor politics before and during the cold war. I do so using a broad range of labor, colonial, diplomatic archives from Tunisia, France, and the United States. This paper thus offers a case study of how intersectional oppressions can limit the practical choices available to social movements.