He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.

Gompers was born Samuel Gumpertz on January 27, 1850, in Spitalfields, a working-class area in the East End of London into a Jewish family that originally hailed from Amsterdam.

His education there was brief, however, and a mere three months after his tenth birthday Gompers was sent to work as an apprentice cigar maker and earn money for his impoverished family.

[9] Owing to dire financial straits, the Gompers family immigrated to the United States in 1863, settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City.

[10] In his free time, the young teenager formed a debate club with his friends, gaining practical experience in public speaking and parliamentary procedure.

In 1873, Gompers moved to the cigar maker David Hirsch & Company, a "high-class shop where only the most skilled workmen were employed".

[18]Gompers complained that the socialist movement had been captured by Lassallean advocates of "political party action" rather than the "militant economic program of Marx".

Every one present has the sad experience, that we are powerless in an isolated condition, while the capitalists are united; therefore, it is the duty of every Cigar Maker to join the organization".

"One of the main objects of the organization", he concluded, "is the elevation of the lowest paid worker to the standard of the highest, and in time we may secure for every person in the trade an existence worthy of human beings.

Despite the commitment of time and energy entailed by his place as head of the American Federation of Labor, Gompers remained first vice president of the Cigar Makers until his death in December 1924.

[22] Under Gompers's tutelage, the AFL coalition gradually gained strength, undermining the position previously held by the Knights of Labor, which as a result, had almost vanished by 1900.

Mandel (1963) argues that his anti-imperialism was based on opportunistic fears of threats to labor's status from low-paid offshore workers and was founded on a sense of racial superiority to the peoples of the Philippines.

[24] By the 1890s, Gompers was planning an international federation of labor, starting with the expansion of AFL affiliates in Canada, especially Ontario.

[25] Gompers, like most labor leaders, opposed unrestricted immigration from Europe because of the fear that it might lower wages of domestic union workers.

He strongly opposed all immigration from Asia because it lowered wages and, in his judgement, represented an alien culture that could not be assimilated easily into that of the U.S.[26] Gompers bragged that the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), later renamed the American Federation of Labor (AFL), "was the first national organization which demanded the exclusion of coolies from the United States".

[29] Other scholars have seriously questioned this conclusion, arguing it oversimplifies the politics and unity of labor leaders and the major parties.

As one reviewer argued in The Journal of American History, major Republican leaders, such as President William McKinley and Senator Mark Hanna, made pro-labor statements, many unions supported their own independent labor parties (or the Socialist Party), and unity within the AFL was never so extensive as claimed.

He was also elected president of the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, which was organized to suppress anti-war propaganda among workers.

[31] He was appointed chairman of the Commission on International Labour Legislation,[23] whose recommendations for a workers' rights charter were incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles.

A volatile situation in Chicago in August 1893 caused the city's then mayor, Carter Harrison III, to warn that the preponderance of the unemployed would lead to riots that would "shake the country", unless Congress interceded.

As reported in the Chicago Tribune on August 31, Gompers inveighed against the controllers of capital and the titans of industry and finance.

"Only those who ignorantly or grabbingly believe in their avarice that business can prosper with wage reductions have yet to learn the lesson of industrial life and progress.

Labor Historian Melvyn Dubofsky has written, "By 1896 Gompers and the AFL were moving to make their peace with Capitalism and the American system ...

"[39] For example, Alex Heron attributes the following quote to Gompers: "The greatest crime an employer can perpetrate on his employees is to fail to operate at a profit".

In 1905, Haywood and the WFM helped to establish the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose members were known as Wobblies, with the goal of organizing the entire working class.

Gompers expressed the desire to die on American soil and he was placed aboard a special train that sped toward the border.

Gompers chided Soderstrom after the latter expressed frustration with the slow pace of progress being made in a local strike, telling him "Young man, you know you can climb the highest mountain if you've got the patience to do it one step at a time."

[57][58][59] On 27 January 1950, the centennial of Gompers’s birth, the U. S. Post Office Department issued a 3¢ commemorative postage stamp in the Famous Americans series with his picture.