Famous labor union leaders
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Samuel Gompers
The labor movement must be a place where every worker is welcome—everybody in, no one left behind. Our actions must reflect the ideals we hold and we must always strive to do better. By looking at ourselves, we have to be honest about the history of our movement.
No one can deny the accomplishments of Samuel Gompers and his contributions to the American labor movement. Nor can we ignore the fact that his views and positions do not align with today’s labor movement, and that part of his legacy sprang from anti-immigrant and racist ideology which caused harm to workers of color and is an affront to our belief in equality for all working people.
- Liz Shuler and Fred Redmond
Biography
Samuel Gompers was the first and longest-serving president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Samuel Gompers is recognized as one of the architects of the labor movement. He developed the structure and characteristic strategies of American unions and effectively used various levers of power to develop the tactics we still see today.
It’s unfortunate that
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Samuel Gompers was born in 1850 to a Jewish family in London, the oldest of five sons. At age 10, Gompers left school for the workforce, first apprenticing as a shoemaker and then joining his father as a cigar maker. In 1863, the Gompers family immigrated to New York City, where Gompers continued as a cigar roller, first at home in their Lower East Side tenement, and then in a local shop. In 1864, he joined the Cigar Makers' International Union (CMIU). Gompers was married by age 17 to Sophia Julian, with whom he would have 12 children.
Through his job and his union involvement, Gompers learned from older immigrants about the role of unions and labor reform. He quickly became a union leader and spokesman, and in 1875 he was elected president of Local 144 of the CMIU. By 1886, he was a vice-president of the international union and had been involved in founding the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU). When the FOTLU became the American Federation of Labor in 1886, Gompers was elected its first president, a position he held for the rest of his life exce
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| Digital History ID 3193 | ||
The labor movement gained strength in the 1850s in such crafts as typographers, molders, and carpenters. Fixed standards of apprenticeship and of wages, hours, and working conditions were drafted. Although such agreements often broke down in periods of depression, a strong nucleus of craft unions had developed by the 1880s so that a central federation emerged. This was the American Federation of Labor.
Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) was the first president of the American Federation of Labor, the first enduring national labor union. He served as president from 1886 until his death in 1924, except for a single year, 1895. Born in London, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 13, and worked as a cigar-maker. He became the leader of the cigar-makers' union, and transformed it into one of the country's strongest unions.
Gompers believed that labor had the most to gain by organizing skilled craft workers, rather than attempting to orga
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