- Person
- Samuel Gompers
- Lived
- 1850–1924
- Field
- Labour movement
- From
- British-born American
The story
From the start, the labour federation Samuel Gompers helped create crossed borders. Its 1881 founding name was the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada. Gompers chaired the committee that drew up its constitution, and he became the first elected president when it was reorganised as the American Federation of Labor in 1886.
In Canada, city labour councils in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and other cities had joined together in 1886 as the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada. At first it mainly represented Ontario and Quebec, but it gradually spread across the country and lobbied provincial governments for wage laws, workers' compensation and sanitary workshops. By 1900 it had become the country's first truly national labour body.
By the 1890s Gompers was planning an international federation of labour, beginning with the expansion of AFL affiliates in Canada, especially in Ontario. He helped the Trades and Labour Congress with money and organisers. At its 1902 convention in Berlin, Ontario, now Kitchener, the Congress aligned itself firmly with the AFL's international unions, and by then AFL unions were the dominant force in the Canadian union movement.
His international outlook continued throughout his life. In April 1918 he addressed the Canadian House of Commons and the Canadian Club in Ottawa on labour and the war. That December, at a conference in Laredo, Texas, delegates from the United States, Mexico and Central and South America founded the Pan-American Federation of Labor and elected Gompers its president. He was attending one of its meetings in Mexico City in December 1924 when he collapsed, just days before his death.
Gompers saw workers' interests as shared across national lines. By helping Canadian unions with funds and organisers, and by bringing labour leaders from across the Americas together, he turned the AFL from a purely American body into the centre of a wider North American and hemispheric labour network, linking working people in several countries.
Why it matters
Gompers's support helped Canadian workers organise strong unions and showed how workers in different countries could help one another.
About Samuel Gompers
London-born Jewish cigar maker who founded and led the American Federation of Labor for nearly four decades, making collective bargaining a fixture of American working life.
More about Samuel Gompers
- Samuel Gompers backed amnesty for political prisonersAlthough he strongly supported the First World War, Samuel Gompers later backed amnesty for people imprisoned under wartime emergency laws for their opinions.
- Samuel Gompers spoke for 25,000 jobless workers in 1893During the 1893 depression, Samuel Gompers addressed 25,000 unemployed workers in Chicago and argued that cutting wages hurt not only workers but the whole economy.
- Samuel Gompers championed collective bargainingSamuel Gompers built the AFL around collective bargaining for higher wages, shorter hours and safe working conditions, procedures between labour and management still used today.
- Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of LaborSamuel Gompers helped found the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it as president, except for one year, until his death in 1924.
- Samuel Gompers chaired the 1919 labour commissionAt the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Samuel Gompers chaired the Commission on International Labour Legislation, whose workers' rights charter was written into the Treaty of Versailles.
- Samuel Gompers gave union members sick and jobless benefitsAfter the cigar makers' union nearly collapsed in the 1870s, Samuel Gompers rebuilt it with sickness, accident, unemployment and death benefits that other unions copied.
Sources
- Samuel Gompers Wikipedia
- Trades and Labour Congress of Canada Wikipedia
- Pan-American Federation of Labor Wikipedia
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