How could a child born in 1850 England go on to influence the entire history and legacy of labor unions to this very day? Pretty easily actually, just ask Samuel Gompers. For the first 10 years of his life, he lived in London, and attended the Jewish Free School. All of that changed in April of 1860, when he was pulled out of school and apprenticed off as a cigarmaker in order to help his family out with their crushing levels of debt. Alas, even this did not help, and the family immigrated to the United States in 1863.
Once in the states, Gompers promptly started working once again as a cigarmaker in Manhattan, becoming active in the Local 15 Union the very next year. In 1873, he jumped to another company, one that was more in line with his advanced abilities. While there, he started to become influenced by the more socialist ideas that were propagated in the talk in that shop. 2 years after that, he became president of the Local 144 Union. In 1881, he was instrumental in founding the organization that would become the American Federation of Labor(which merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 to become the AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the United States). In 1894, he was instrumental in promoting the new Labor Day holiday that had been recognized by Congress to placate the Pullman strikers.
A number of years later, he popped back up when the United States got involved in World War I, urging all unions to hold off on striking and other labor actions during wartime so as to give America and its companies every advantage possible. Gompers died in 1924, but many of his methods of organizing labor are used to this day even. Additionally, there is both a park and a statue in downtown Chicago memorializing his roles in the labor history of this city and all others as well.
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