Labor Under Siege

Report Outline
Labor's Maturity Pains
Closing Unions' Ranks
Future Coalition Building
Special Focus

Labor's Maturity Pains

Gompers Centenary and Kirkland Strategy

When somebody who is 95 years old — and looks and feels it — starts pretending to be 100, you might suspect that he's trying to make the best of a bad situation. Some people think that American labor leaders are acting that way. They have designated 1981 the labor movement's centennial year, and on Nov. 15 representatives of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations will celebrate the occasion at the biennial AFL-CIO convention in New York. But it isn't the federation's 100th birthday, and some say there isn't much to celebrate.

What this year's convention commemorates is the emergence of Samuel Gompers, the father of the American labor movement, as a top union leader. On Nov. 15, 1881, Gompers was among a small group of men who met at Pittsburgh, Pa., to found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the predecessor of the AFL. Five years later, when the AFL itself was founded at a meeting in Columbus, Ohio, Gompers was elected its first president. It was Gompers who modeled the American unions on the British trade union movement, shying away from the broad social and political objectives pursued by working class organizations in continental Europe.

A cigar maker by trade, Gompers believed that the labor movement's future depended on the unionization of skilled craftsmen — those whose services society could least easily dispense with. Instead of trying to organize all workers into a disciplined political force capable of remaking society, Gompers made it the AFL's principal mission to win higher wages, benefits and improved working conditions for union members.