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
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.
So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
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.
Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . . There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.
When a man puts a pistol to my head and tells me to deliver, there is no arbitration.
We don't love to work only, ... The Samuel Gompers Papers.
There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.
We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor.
The day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed ... that the workers of our day lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.
W.Z. Foster {head of the American Communist Party}, who had no money, went to Moscow and came back and announced that he was building a great secret machine to undermine the American labor movement and turn it over to the Red International, owned by Lenin. He began publication of an expensive magazine and proclaimed 'a thousand secret agents in a thousand communities.'
[The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves...
The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted and coddled and given special consideration and special privilege. Of course that can't be done.
No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money