Daniel Keefe

Daniel Joseph Keefe (September 27, 1852 – January 2, 1929) was a founder and the first president of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), a trade union representing waterside workers in Canada and the United States of America.

[1] Born in Willow Springs, Illinois the son of a teamster (wagon driver) of Irish ancestry, Daniel Keefe left school in the fourth grade and began working on the Chicago waterfront.

[3] In 1892 at a convention in Detroit, eleven local unions representing waterside workers from the Great Lakes region formed a single organization, the National Longshoremen's Association of the United States, and elected Daniel Keefe as president.

By 1895 following recruitment of workers in Canada, the organization was renamed the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and Keefe affiliated the union to the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Stanford Lyman argues[6] that Keefe fitted the role, like his predecessors, because of nativist views and a willingness to use the post to enforce exclusion of migrant workers, especially from China.