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
[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 working people know no country. They are citizens of the world.
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.
Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
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 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.