Samuel Gompers

On January 27, 1850, in London, England, Samuel Gompers was born into a Jewish cigar-making family and learned skilled labor at an early age. Immigration to New York in 1863 placed him in a city where trade unions, immigrant neighborhoods, and industrial capitalism collided daily. Work in the cigar trade brought him into labor organization and practical collective bargaining.

Gompers helped found the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and remained its dominant leader for decades. He favored craft unionism, higher wages, shorter hours, and negotiated gains over sweeping socialist transformation, giving organized labor a durable institutional strategy. Under his leadership the AFL became the most important labor federation in the United States during the closing years of the nineteenth century.

Gompers's model shaped labor law, strike strategy, and the structure later used by the broader union movement in the Progressive Era and New Deal. The long history of collective bargaining in American industry owes much to the institutional choices he made in the Gilded Age.