Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gomperswas an English-born, American labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor, and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining to secure shorter hours and higher wages, the first essential steps, he believed, to emancipating...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth27 January 1850
CountryUnited States of America
You can't do it unless you organize.
So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service, we have sustained our forward progress, and we have made our labor movement something to be respected and accorded a place in the councils of the Republic. Where we have blundered into trying to force a policy or decision, even though wise and right, we have impeded if not interrupted the realization of our own aims.
Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.
No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.
So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
Show me the country that has no strikes and I'll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
There are such wonderful possibilities in the life of each man and woman! No human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that all alike may be free to live life to the fullest.
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
Workingmen are at the foundation of society. Show me that product of human endeavor in the making of which the workingman has had no share, and I will show you something that society can well dispense with.
It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.
Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop; to free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.
The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.
Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it on riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?