Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), American labor leader, who, as president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), stressed cooperation between management and labor, rather than strike actions, as a means of obtaining labor demands.

Gompers was born January 27, 1850, in London. After only four years of elementary school education, he was apprenticed to a cigar maker in the East End of London, where he learned the trade that he followed for a quarter of a century. In 1863 he accompanied his family to New York City. There he later became active in the social clubs, fraternal orders, and labor unions of the Lower East Side, then teeming with emigrants from Europe. Unlike many of the other emigrants who were the bearers of European revolutionary traditions, Gompers's ideas were moderate, and he exerted a powerful influence in the evolution of American labor unionism from radicalism to conservatism.

Gompers became a member of the Cigar Maker's International Union in 1864 and ten years later helped found Local 144 of the international union, of which he remained a member for the rest of his life. He was elected president of Local 144 in 1874. In 1881 he was one of the chief founders and the first president of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States of America and Canada, which was established solely to influence legislation in behalf of labor. During the following years he was a leader in the movement to organize a national federation of labor unions. When the AFL was founded in 1886, Gompers was elected president of the organization; thereafter until his death, except in 1895, he was reelected annually to that position.

Gompers was the chief exponent of the policies that gave the AFL its character as a conservative federation of autonomous craft unions. He resisted efforts of socialist infiltration and control of the federation and fought the openly antagonistic and more militant Industrial Workers of the World. Gompers used the growing influence of the AFL to secure the passage of federal and state legislation favorable to labor. He formulated the federation's policy of urging its members to support candidates for public office, regardless of political affiliation, who were considered friendly to labor.

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Gompers a member of the Advisory Committee to the Council of National Defense. After the war, on a tour of Europe in 1918, when that continent was experiencing revolutionary upheavals, Gompers was hailed as a statesmanlike labor leader by the heads of various governments, but encountered great hostility from masses of workers. At the Peace Conference of 1919, Gompers served as chairman of the Commission on International Labor Legislation. Returning to the U.S., he later played a leading role in establishing the influence of the federation in various Latin American countries.