How Did Samuel Gompers Influence The Labor Movement

Samuel Gompers was an early labor leader, he was the first in his own union ,then later was president of the American Federation of Labor. He was president for continuously between 1886 and 1924, Gompers led the labor movement in gaining solid amounts for workers. He maintained a focus of view trade unionism, and believed that unions should concentrate on better collective bargained agreements and legislation affecting labor, while avoiding a large number social issues. American Federation of Labor (AFL); to him, as much as to anyone else, is that the American labor movement owed it’s structure and characteristic strategies. Under his leadership, the A.F.L. became the largest and most influential labor federation in the world. It grew from

He then served as second vice president of the CMIU from 1886 to 1896, when he was elevated to first vice president. In the 1880s, Gompers was also very educated in establishing the Federation of Organized Trades and labor Unions, which he served as vice president from 1880 -1886 then after he changed the organization’s name from F.O.T.L.U. to A.F.L. Gompers was later elected as its very first president, a position he held for nearly forty years. He distrusted intellectual reformers, and feared their influence would sidetrack labour’s efforts away from economic goals. With his election as president of the AFL in 1886, he wanted to build a national federation of trade union dedicated to these principles. He immediately threw himself into the organization’s first big effort a nationwide general strike on May 1,1886 in support of an eight hour

Gompers was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense (1917 to 1919), on which he helped to establish an unprecedented wartime labor policy that clearly laid out government support for independent trade unions and collective bargaining. At the end of World War I, Wilson appointed Gompers to the Commission on International Labor Legislation at the Versailles Peace Conference, where he helped to create what became the International Labor Organization (ILO), under the League of Nations.

He also was president of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. Samuel was taken ill while attending a conference of that federation in Mexico City and died in San Antonio, Texas, on December 13, 1924. The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in 1950, commemorating the centenary of his birth. Of the labor movement, Gompers said,“Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people," he said. “There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire ... there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to