Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers was an Englishmen born of Jewish-Dutch descent, who went to the United States at the age of 13, in the company of his family. Forced by financial circumstances he began working as a cigar maker in England, a trade he continued in the United States to help support the family. Because of the need to work he received little in the manner of a formal education, though he studied the Talmud on his own at night. Upon arrival in the United States his father made cigars at home, and Samuel assisted him in their manufacture, rolling cigars by hand from the aged leaf purchased still on the heavy stalk.
Samuel joined a debating society while still in his early teens, which helped him to develop oratorical skills, and in 1864 joined the loosely organized Cigar Makers Union Local 15. Cigar makers were craftsmen, and the skill involved in producing well rolled and wrapped cigars was evident in the quality of the finished product. Higher quality meant higher prices, and skilled cigar makers were in demand, allowing them to move from shop to shop, which could be any room with light and a table on which to work. At seventeen Gompers married a co-worker; six years later he joined the David Hersch Cigar company, which employed only highly skilled workers, most of them German.
By the time he was 25 Gompers’ activities in the union led to his election as president of the Cigar Maker’s International Union Local 144. In his early days as a union leader Gompers was a radical, arguing that the capitalists which employed them were driven by a single motivation – profits – and that only through assertion of their rights through strikes and demonstrations could the workers receive what was rightfully theirs. Gompers became one of the leaders in the formation of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881, which was reorganized as the American Federation of Labor in 1886, with Gompers as its president.
Gompers, an immigrant himself, led the AFL to oppose unlimited immigration, supporting the imposition of quotas based on the idea that additional workers reduced wages. The AFL endorsed the immigration laws which reduced the flow of eastern and southern Europeans to the United States. Gompers used the growing strength of the AFL to support political candidates favorable to its position on labor issues, and accumulated significant power in Washington himself. He endorsed American actions in the Spanish-American war and World War 1, and attended the Paris Peace Conference following the latter as a consultant on labor issues.
Following the First World War, Gompers politics and support of collective bargaining were deemed too conservative, and more radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and others attracted socialists and in some instances communists. By then Gompers had come to believe that the most important thing an employer owed to his employees was a profitable company. Gompers was instrumental in developing a system of unionization in the United States through which workers received improved wages, working conditions, and benefits, through negotiations with employers and influence on legislators.