The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was not merely an organization; it was a cathedral of work, built brick by painstaking brick by the skilled hands of a new American aristocracy—the craftsmen. For nearly a century, it stood as the dominant monument in the landscape of American labor. Born from the ashes of failed utopian dreams in the Gilded Age, the AFL was a federation of autonomous Trade Unions that championed a revolutionary, yet deeply pragmatic, philosophy: “pure and simple unionism.” It cared little for remaking society and everything for securing a larger slice of the capitalist pie for its members. Led by the indefatigable Samuel Gompers, the AFL focused relentlessly on the tangible—higher wages, shorter hours, safer conditions—achieved through the economic muscle of collective bargaining and the strike. It was an exclusive club, a fortress built to protect the skilled, white, male worker from the chaotic tides of industrialization, leaving the vast, unskilled masses outside its walls. In its rise, its schism with its more radical progeny the CIO, its eventual merger, and its long decline, the story of the AFL is the story of the American worker's struggle to carve out a realm of dignity and prosperity, and in doing so, creating the very foundations of the 20th-century American middle class.
The story of the AFL begins in the fire, smoke, and deafening noise of the second Industrial Revolution. In the decades following the American Civil War, the United States transformed at a dizzying pace. A nation of farmers and artisans was rapidly becoming a nation of wage-earners, its economic lifeblood pumped through a new circulatory system of Railroad tracks and telegraph wires. Immense fortunes were forged in steel, oil, and finance, creating a class of “robber barons” whose wealth and power were unprecedented. This era, cynically dubbed “the Gilded Age” by Mark Twain, glittered on the surface but was corroded by deep social injustices underneath. For the millions who toiled in the factories, mines, and mills, life was often brutal, short, and cheap. They faced grueling 10- or 12-hour workdays, six or seven days a week, in perilous conditions for poverty-level wages. There was no safety net—no workers' compensation, no unemployment insurance, no retirement Pension. An injury could mean destitution; a layoff, starvation.
Into this crucible, early labor movements emerged, fueled by a mixture of desperation and idealism. The first great post-war national organization was the National Labor Union (NLU), which focused more on political reform and cooperatives than on direct confrontations with employers. It flickered brightly but faded quickly, undone by its broad, unwieldy political agenda. It was succeeded by a far more formidable and romantic organization: the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. Founded as a secret society in 1869, the Knights were visionary. They threw their doors open to nearly everyone—skilled and unskilled, men and women, Black and white workers (though pointedly excluding the Chinese). Their motto, “An injury to one is the concern of all,” encapsulated a grand, almost spiritual, vision of a cooperative commonwealth that would one day replace the wage system entirely. For a time, the Knights' star ascended spectacularly. They grew to over 700,000 members by the mid-1880s, winning several key strikes and capturing the public imagination. But their very inclusiveness became a structural flaw. A skilled locomotive engineer had vastly different interests and bargaining power than an unskilled textile worker or a farmhand. The organization's centralized structure struggled to manage the conflicting goals of its diverse membership. Their broad social vision often clashed with the immediate, practical needs of workers on the shop floor. The final, fatal blow came in 1886. During a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown at police, leading to a riot and the subsequent trial and execution of several anarchist leaders. Though the Knights of Labor had no direct connection to the bombing, the tide of public opinion turned violently against them. They were branded as dangerous radicals, and their dream of one big union for all producers began to crumble.
Watching the Knights' dramatic rise and fall was a group of far more pragmatic labor leaders, chief among them a Dutch-Jewish immigrant cigar maker from London named Samuel Gompers. Gompers and his colleagues in the Cigar Makers' International Union were men of the craft. They saw the world not through the lens of grand ideology but through the tangible reality of the workshop. They believed the Knights' fatal error was in mixing the skilled with the unskilled, diluting the immense bargaining power that a unified group of irreplaceable craftsmen could wield. Why, they argued, should a skilled carpenter, whose apprenticeship represented a significant investment of time and skill, subordinate his interests to the vague, utopian goals of a movement that included unskilled laborers who could be replaced in a day? This philosophy, which would come to be known as Craft Unionism, was the intellectual bedrock of the AFL. It was a conscious rejection of the Knights' idealism. Its core principles were simple and direct:
In December 1886, just months after the Haymarket Affair had sealed the Knights' fate, Gompers and other leaders of disgruntled craft unions met in Columbus, Ohio. There, they founded the American Federation of Labor. It was not a “union” in the way the Knights were; it was a voluntary federation of unions. Its structure mirrored that of the United States government—a federal system designed to preserve the power of its constituent parts. Samuel Gompers was elected its first president, a position he would hold, with the exception of one year, until his death in 1924. The House of Labor had laid its foundation.
The early decades of the AFL were a long, arduous process of construction, marked by brutal opposition from employers, hostile courts, and a skeptical public. Yet, under Gompers's steady, shrewd leadership, the federation not only survived but slowly, methodically, grew into the most powerful labor body in the country.
At the heart of Gompers's strategy was a deep-seated distrust of the state, a philosophy known as “voluntarism.” Unlike European labor movements, which were often tied to socialist or labor parties and sought to capture the power of government, the AFL was profoundly skeptical of legislative solutions. Gompers believed that real, lasting gains for workers were won through their own economic power at the bargaining table, not granted as gifts from politicians. “What the government can give,” he often warned, “it can also take away.” This led to a unique political strategy: non-partisanship. The AFL would not align itself with any political party. Instead, it would adhere to a simple dictum: “Reward your friends and punish your enemies,” regardless of party affiliation. The union's primary weapons were not the ballot box, but the tools of economic warfare: the strike, the picket line, and the boycott. A signed contract, a “trade agreement,” was labor's sacred text—a binding document won through its own strength and vigilance. This voluntarist creed would define the AFL's character for over half a century, setting it on a fundamentally different path from its international counterparts.
The AFL's resolve was tested in a series of epic industrial battles that became legendary in the annals of labor history. In 1892, at Andrew Carnegie's steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (an AFL affiliate) was locked out after refusing a wage cut. The plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, hired 300 armed Pinkerton agents to protect the strikebreakers. When the Pinkertons were floated up the Monongahela River on barges, they were met by thousands of striking workers and townspeople. A bloody, day-long battle ensued, leaving at least a dozen people dead. The state militia was called in, and the union was ultimately broken. Two years later, in 1894, the Pullman Strike demonstrated the immense power of the forces arrayed against labor. When the Pullman Palace Car Company drastically cut wages but not the rent it charged workers in its company town, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs (who was not affiliated with the AFL), launched a massive boycott, refusing to handle any train with a Pullman car. The boycott crippled the nation's rail traffic. The federal government, claiming the strike was illegally interfering with the U.S. Mail, obtained a court injunction to stop it. President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to Chicago, the strike's epicenter, leading to violent clashes and dozens of deaths. Debs was jailed, and his union was crushed. The AFL, true to its autonomous principles, offered only moral support in these conflicts. Gompers saw the Pullman Strike as a perfect example of the dangers of a sympathetic strike—a battle the craft unions could not win and which threatened to bring the full weight of the state down upon the entire labor movement. These defeats were devastating, but they hardened the AFL's pragmatic approach. It learned to be cautious, to pick its battles carefully, and to rely on the disciplined economic power of its skilled members rather than the volatile passions of mass action.
The AFL's institutional strength was inextricably linked to its greatest social and moral weakness: its exclusivity. The federation was, by design, a “House of Labor” for the skilled. Its core affiliates—the carpenters, the printers, the plumbers, the cigar makers—were composed almost entirely of native-born, white men. They viewed the growing waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as African Americans migrating from the South, not as brothers in the struggle but as a threat—a vast pool of cheap, unskilled labor that could be used to break strikes and drive down wages. Many AFL unions had explicit racial exclusion clauses in their constitutions. Others used prohibitive initiation fees or control over apprenticeship programs to keep Black workers and new immigrants out. Women were also largely ignored, seen as temporary workers who belonged in the home and whose presence in the workforce depressed male wages. This exclusionary stance created a stable, disciplined, and relatively privileged membership—an “aristocracy of labor.” It allowed the AFL to secure significant gains for its members, who by the early 20th century often enjoyed wages and working conditions far superior to their unskilled counterparts. But it came at a tremendous cost. The AFL had built a fortress, but in doing so, it had left the majority of the American working class outside, defenseless in the wildlands of industrial capitalism.
The early 20th century brought new challenges that would test the very foundations of the AFL's philosophy. The world of small workshops and skilled artisans was giving way to the era of mass production, epitomized by the Ford Motor Company's revolutionary Assembly Line. This new industrial landscape created a new type of worker—the semi-skilled machine operator, a cog in a vast, integrated production process. Craft Unionism was utterly unequipped to organize such a workplace. How could you organize a Ford plant, with its thousands of workers performing hundreds of different specialized tasks, into dozens of separate craft unions? It was an organizational nightmare. A new idea was needed.
That idea was Industrial Unionism. Its logic was as simple and powerful as the assembly line itself: organize all workers in a single industry—skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled—into one single union. One plant, one industry, one union. This was the only way, its proponents argued, to confront the consolidated power of modern corporations like General Motors or U.S. Steel. Within the AFL, a fierce debate over this issue began to smolder, pitting the old guard craft unionists against a new, more aggressive faction of industrial union advocates. The Great Depression fanned these embers into a raging fire. With a quarter of the workforce unemployed, the labor movement was on its knees. But the crisis also created a political sea change. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and the subsequent passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 (commonly known as the Wagner Act) transformed the legal landscape. For the first time, the federal government explicitly protected the right of workers to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining. It was a green light for mass organization, an opportunity the likes of which labor had never seen. The internal AFL conflict now reached its breaking point. The industrial union faction was led by the most formidable labor leader of his generation: John L. Lewis, the thunderous, scowling president of the United Mine Workers. Lewis, a masterful orator and ruthless strategist, saw the Wagner Act as a historic opportunity to organize the millions of workers in the mass-production industries who had been ignored by the AFL. He and his allies demanded that the federation charter new, industrial unions for the auto, steel, rubber, and other major industries.
The old guard, led by men like William “Big Bill” Hutcheson of the Carpenters, vehemently resisted. They saw Industrial Unionism as a threat to their sovereignty and the privileged position of their skilled members. The conflict came to a head at the AFL's 1935 convention in Atlantic City. After a heated debate, the fiery Lewis confronted Hutcheson on the convention floor. Words were exchanged, and in a moment that has become iconic in labor history, the 240-pound Lewis landed a massive punch, knocking the 300-pound Hutcheson to the ground. The physical blow symbolized the irreparable ideological split. Soon after, Lewis and the leaders of other industrial-minded unions formed the Committee for Industrial Organization within the AFL to spearhead organizing drives in mass-production industries. The AFL's executive council, seeing this as an act of insurrection, ordered the committee to disband. When Lewis and his allies refused, they were suspended and, in 1938, formally expelled. The Committee for Industrial Organization was reborn as a rival federation: the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or the CIO. The House of Labor was now a house divided. For the next two decades, the AFL and the CIO engaged in a fierce, dynamic, and often bitter rivalry. The young, aggressive CIO pioneered new tactics, like the “sit-down strike,” where workers occupied factories to prevent the use of strikebreakers. They successfully organized the auto and steel industries in a series of dramatic campaigns. Spurred by this competition, the AFL was forced to evolve. It shed some of its old craft snobbery and began organizing on a more industrial basis itself, particularly with its Teamsters and Machinists unions. This “civil war” within the labor movement, while acrimonious, unleashed an unprecedented wave of unionization. Millions of workers flocked to both federations, and by the end of World War II, the American labor movement was larger and more powerful than ever before.
The rivalry that had defined American labor for twenty years began to cool in the post-war era. The passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which curtailed many union powers, reminded both federations that they had a common enemy. The intense passions of the Cold War also pushed them together, as both the AFL and the CIO were staunchly anti-communist and sought to present a united front. Most importantly, the old guard was passing from the scene. The deaths of AFL President William Green and CIO President Philip Murray in 1952 brought new leaders to the forefront: the gruff, pragmatic George Meany for the AFL and the brilliant, visionary Walter Reuther for the CIO.
After years of negotiations, the two labor giants agreed to put aside their differences. On a historic day in December 1955, in New York City, the AFL and the CIO formally merged, creating a single, massive federation: the AFL-CIO. George Meany became its first president. The new organization represented over 15 million workers, accounting for roughly one out of every three non-agricultural workers in the United States. The House of Labor was finally whole, and it stood at the apex of its power and influence. This era, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, was the golden age of American labor. “Big Labor” was now a recognized pillar of the American establishment, alongside “Big Business” and “Big Government.” Union leaders advised presidents, and the AFL-CIO's political endorsements were courted by all. The collective bargaining agreements negotiated by its powerful affiliates—especially the United Auto Workers—set the national standard. The “Treaty of Detroit,” an implicit post-war compact between automakers and the UAW, saw the union trade management's “right to manage” the shop floor for a stunning array of benefits: high wages that rose with productivity, cost-of-living adjustments, employer-funded healthcare, and generous private pensions. These union-won benefits didn't just help union members; they rippled throughout the economy. To compete for workers and avoid unionization, non-union companies often matched the wages and benefits offered in the unionized sector. The labor movement became a great engine of economic equality, building a vast and prosperous middle class and helping to create the most equitable period of economic growth in American history. The 40-hour work week, paid vacations, workplace safety regulations—all cornerstones of the “American Dream”—were either directly won or strongly championed by the labor movement that the AFL had built. Culturally, the union was a central institution in the lives of millions. The union hall was not just a place for meetings; it was a community center, a social club, and a hub of civic life. Union membership was a source of identity, a badge of honor that signified a place in the new industrial middle class.
Even at its zenith, the forces that would lead to the AFL-CIO's long, slow decline were already in motion. The world that had forged the AFL and given it power was beginning to vanish.
A confluence of powerful trends began to chip away at the foundations of the House of Labor:
Union membership, which had peaked at around 35% of the non-farm workforce in the mid-1950s, began a steady and relentless decline. Today, it stands at just over 10%, with the majority of members now working in the public sector. The American Federation of Labor, born in 1886 as a pragmatic craft federation, now exists as the largest part of the AFL-CIO, an organization struggling to find its footing in the 21st-century world of the “gig economy,” fissured workplaces, and global supply chains. Yet, the legacy of the house that Samuel Gompers built is all around us. The very structure of the American workday, the concept of a weekend, the expectation of a safe workplace, the existence of employer-provided health insurance—these are the architectural relics of the world the AFL helped create. It was a flawed institution, often shortsighted, exclusionary, and resistant to change. But for a critical period in American history, it was the most powerful and effective voice that working people had. It fought for a simple, profound idea: that those who labor to create a nation's wealth are entitled to a fair share of it, and to a life of security and dignity. The long, complex, and dramatic story of the AFL is a testament to that enduring struggle.