The American Federation of Labor

¶ … American Federation of Labor

Growing out of the earlier Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the American Federation of Labor, AFL, was organized as an association of trade unions in 1886 (American pp). Its president, Samuel Gompers, who served almost every year until 1924, believed that unions open to workers of all types of skills within a given industry, called industrial unions, were too undisciplined to survive the repressive tactics that government and management used to break American unions (American pp). Gompers was convinced that the solution was 'craft unions,' each limited to the skilled workers in a single trade (American pp). His "pure and simple unionism" was based on the belief that labor should not waste its energies fighting capitalism, but rather devote itself to hammering out the best arrangement it could under the existing system, by employing strikes, boycotts, and negotiations to win better working conditions, higher wages, and more union recognition (American pp).

The American Federation of Labor was the largest union grouping in the United States for the first half of the twentieth century, even after the Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO, was organized in 1938 by unions that left the AFL due to its opposition to organizing mass production industries (American1 pp). Although the union was founded and dominated by craft unions throughout the first fifty years, many of its craft union affiliates turned to organizing on an industrial basis to meet the challenge from the CIO during the 1940's (American1 pp).