Gompers-Lewis Essay, Research Paper

The term labor movement is often applied to any

organization or association of wage earners who join together to

advance their common interests. It more broadly applies,

however, to any association of workers by geographical area,

trade or industry, or any other factor. While labor unions have

been the almost exclusive center of the modern labor movement in

the United States, in Western Europe, and in many other

countries, the term labor movement has come to embrace

labor-oriented political parties as well as labor unions,

usually combined in a loose alliance. (Flagger, 2)

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ups

and downs of the business cycle have influenced labor movements

in the United States. The expansion of economic activity –

bringing with it growth in the demand for labor — creates

conditions favorable to union organization and to demands of

wage earners for improved living standards. Correspondingly,

significant economic decline weakens the position of workers and

labor unions and often leads to a greater emphasis on government

solutions to labor’s problems.

Generally, American unions had their greatest successes

among blue-collar, or manual, workers, especially in the great

goods-producing sectors of the economy. (Flagger 9) In recent

decades there has been a shift away from goods to service

production. Unions have not been as successful in organizing

workers in the services, large numbers of whom are women,

including many part-time employees.

It was during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that

the United States saw the true effects labor unions could cause.

Through powerful leaders it was obvious how much could really be

accomplished in favor of workers. Leaders such as Samuel

Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, and John

L. Lewis, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations,

were just two of this countries great leaders amongst labor

unions. These men were intelligent and used their heads to get

the job done and in this sense, they shared many things in

common.

Samuel Gompers was one of the founders of the American

Federation of Labor in 1886. He was elected president, a

position which he held, except for one year, until his death 38

years later. Under his leadership, the organization grew from a

handful of struggling labor unions to become the dominant

organization within the Labor Movement in the United States and

Canada. (internet source*)

Gompers was born in London, England, on January 26, 1850.

His parents were poor immigrant Jews from Holland. He

apprenticed and became a cigar maker, a trade he brought with

him to New York when his family emigrated to America in 1863.

Life was far from easy in the crowded slums of New York where

Gompers spent the rest of his childhood. There were a few

relatively large cigar making shops, perhaps, with as many as

seventy-five employees; but much of the work was done in a

thousand or more sweatshops, often the same crowded apartments

where the workers lived. Thousands of little children worked in

New York sweatshops and factories, as they helped their parents

maintain enough money to survive with the little income child

laborers were able to bring in. With such a difficult beginning

himself, this may have sparked Gompers strive to create a more

descent working environment and better pay for all in the

future.

In 1881 Samuel Gompers was sent as the delegate of the

Cigar Makers to a conference of various unions which created a

loose confederation to be called the Federation of Organized

Trades and Labor Councils. Although without the title of

President, as head of the legislative committee, Gompers became

its leader, practically speaking; but the organization was

structurally weak and ineffective. (Quaglieri, 45)

By 1885, Gompers had become highly skilled at his trade and

was employed in one of the larger shops. He was respected by

his fellow workers, mostly Germans, who elected him as president

of Cigar Makers Union Local 144. This, alone being a great

accomplishment, was even harder for Gompers, having to stand

against racial criticism of Germans, because of his poor Jewish

heritage. He and the other officers were unpaid as they

struggled to keep the union together in the face of

mechanization and the flooding of the labor market by scores of

new immigrants, largely Bohemian.

Nevertheless, the need for close cooperation among

like-minded labor organizations was abundantly evident; so the

organization was reconstituted in 1886 as the American

Federation of Labor. This time with Gompers as the President.

He works tirelessly in a cramped office the could not have been

much more than an 8×10 room in a shed. His son was the office

boy. There was $160 in the treasury. As Gompers said, it was

“much work, little pay, and very little honor. (internet*)

However, four years later, the AFL represented 250,000 workers.

In two more years the number had grown to over one million.

Under Gompers, the guiding principle was to concentrate on

collective bargaining with employers, and on legislative issues

directly affecting the job. Broad social goals and political

entanglements were left to others.

John L. Lewis, another great influence on American history,

worked as a coal miner and rose through the union ranks to

become president of the United Mine Workers (UMW) of America in

1920. Forceful and eloquent, Lewis built up the union and won

the loyalty of the miners. He was an important figure in the

AFL as well, along with Gompers, until he founded the Congress

of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935, which he headed as

president until 1940. At first, a supporter of President

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lewis became his principal labor critic,

backing Wendell Willkie in the 1940 election.

In 1942, Lewis pulled the UMW out of the CIO. During World

War II, he led the coal miners in several strikes, arousing

public anger and drew a heavy fine in 1948 for failing to obey a

court order ending a protracted strike. By the 1950s Lewis,

becoming less aggressive, sought accommodation with the

depressed coal industry. He resigned the UMW presidency in

1960. (52)

Gompers and Lewis were alike in many ways. Both awesome

leaders in relatively the same field, they truly created

desperately wanted change amongst laborers. In both cases of

the AFL and the CIO, as presidents of their unions, the groups

flourished; whether it was in members, outside support, finance

or all of these. Both unions were also created around a certain

time period, founded in the same fifty year time frame, and

continued to co-exist for years following. Both men struggled

through the same difficult downfalls that all unions of the time

felt and were able to pull through and keep their unions strong.

Their contributions to American history are important. It was

only when such strong groups were finally founded, that real

progress in the middle-working class began to become evident.

If it were not for such ideals and coalitions, it is impossible

to tell where today s working class might be.

However, to contrast the two men and their unions, the

AFL, although it included political demands in its platform, was

largely controlled by the national unions of skilled workers and

was devoted to practical union objectives. A basic principle

was the safeguarding of its affiliates’ individual autonomies

and jurisdictions. The unions of the AFL placed great emphasis

on written collective agreements, including the closed shop, in

which only union members are permitted to work. The AFL unions

also insisted that members pay relatively high dues, and many of

them established insurance and strike benefits. (Flager, 18)

They came to be characterized by job consciousness as opposed to

class consciousness.

John Lewis along with other labor workers, noticing the

largely ignored mass-production workers, proposed great new

organizing drives to build industrial unions that would embrace

all employees — skilled and unskilled — in the steel, auto,

rubber, and other major industries. When his proposal was

rejected by the traditional craft unions in control of the AFL,

Lewis set up a special committee in 1936 to perform this task.

For taking this action, his union, the United Mine Workers of

America, and those of his collaborators were expelled from the

AFL.

In the end, though both unions may have focused on two

separate groups of people, its ideals remained the same. In the

1950s, a social and political environment that was less

favorable to unions, the passing of leaders who had led the

struggle between the AFL and CIO, and other factors led to the

unification of the two federations in 1955. AFL President

George Meany and Walter Reuther, president of both the CIO and

the United Automobile Workers (UAW), took the initiative. The

new organization, the AFL-CIO, accepted the principle that both

craft and industrial unions could exist side by side, as all AFL

and CIO affiliates were accepted into the new body intact. (27)

Membership of the united movement was about 15 million, with an

additional 2 million outside the AFL-CIO in independent unions.

The contributions by Gompers and Lewis to our society still

carry on today as the AFL-CIO still continues to harbor laborers

and fight for better workers rights everyday.

Although these men were similar in many ways and still

different in small aspects, the man that had made the greater

impact in our history would be Samuel Gompers, for whom Gompers

Park on Chicago s Northwest Side and Samuel Gompers Park in

Washington D.C. was named. With his presidency in the AFL came

an increase in membership by over four times the previous

amount. It was also no small achievement that under his

leadership, the AFL union was able to stick together through

World War II, the Great Depression and F.D.R. s New Deal, which

only further weakened the unions around it. He was a supporter

of trade unionism in Mexico as well, and, though elderly and in

failing health, he went to Mexico City to attend the

inauguration of Mexico’s reform President Calles; and, also, the

Congress of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. It was at the

Congress that his final collapse occurred. He was rushed to a

hospital in San Antonio, Texas where he died on December 13,

1924. It is for these reasons and more that the name Gompers

will never be left out of any American History book written in

the future.