Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) was one of the most important people involved in establishing the labour movement in the USA and one of the most influential people involved in shaping the nature of twentieth century politics in that country. Gompers was born in Britain but migrated to America where he pursued his father’s career of cigar-maker. In an era of intense anti-labour sentiment, fanned by the hold that corporate interests had over the government and the support of the mainstream media, as right-wing then as it is today, Gompers and his colleagues worked to create unions for workers that would offer them some security in employment, collective bargaining rights and a sense of dignity and solidarity. By 1886, he had led the cigar workers national organisation to becoming part of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and he was its president until his death (with a gap of one year). He was, therefore, the longest-standing president of the AFL in its history.

As a labour activist, Gompers was most well-known for the conservatism of his actions and beliefs. He worked assiduously to keep the labour union movement ‘politically neutral’ – that is, not willing to threaten change to the status quo. When labour leaders debated whether or not to create a specific political party to represent the interests of workers, following Labour Party examples in Europe, his view prevailed that the movement should work within the existing political structure, which had in the Democratic and Republican parties two large and powerful structure which he did not think could be threatened. Consequently, the AFL established the precedent that the movement should “reward its friends and punish its enemies” wherever they may be found and in whatever political party they resided. Had Gompers been defeated in the ideological debate, it is possible that the two-party structure might have been challenged and, perhaps, the example of certain European countries followed that the centrist Democratic party have been replaced by a more worker-oriented Labour Party.

Opposition to labour rights and to unions continues in most countries until the present day. As Michael D. Yates expresses it: “It is only a slight exaggeration to state that whatever is good for working people will be presented to us as bad … Nowhere is this more the case than with unions, and the reason is not hard to discover. The corporate pursuit of profits is the underpinning of our social order, from the daily newspapers to the halls of Congress (p.39).” And the pursuit of profits is made so much easier when the bosses have complete charge of the workplace and can hire and fire without hindrance.

For more details, see the revised second edition of Why Unions Matter by Michael D. Yates, published by the Monthly Review Press in New York, 2009.