Samuel Gompers

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

We feel as if we were hard labor convicts where everything but our feeding has been made subject to iron rules. We have become lost as human beings, and have been turned into slaves.

[The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves...

In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted …

As far as is possible under the ruthless tyranny the organized labor of [Soviet] Russia is everywhere in a state of full revolt.

The Soviet scheme of compulsory labor is being applied on such a broad scale and is so boldly presented as a ‘proletarian’ scheme that it constitutes the gravest danger that has confronted labor for centuries.

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our …

We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, …

The man who receives five thousand dollars a year wants six thousand dollars a year, and the man who owns eight or nine hundred thousand dollars will want a hundred thousand dollars more to make it a million, while the man who has his …