Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Gompers

Gompers is picking a fight with a comforting lie: that the people who own the workplace and the people who sell their time in it are basically on the same team. The line is blunt on purpose. It doesn’t argue; it draws a boundary, the rhetorical equivalent of a picket line. In an era when “harmony” between capital and labor was often preached by employers, politicians, and polite reformers, Gompers treats that language as a strategy of control. If interests were common, strikes would be irrational, unions unnecessary, and wage demands selfish. Calling the interests incompatible makes collective action feel not only justified, but morally obligatory.

The subtext is structural rather than personal. Gompers isn’t claiming every boss is a villain or every worker a saint; he’s saying the incentives are wired to clash. Capital wants lower labor costs, predictable output, and managerial authority. Labor wants higher wages, safer conditions, shorter hours, and some say in how power is exercised. Even “shared” goals like a thriving company aren’t symmetrical, because who gets the surplus and who absorbs the risk is the whole argument.

Context matters: Gompers built the American Federation of Labor during the brutal churn of industrial capitalism, when courts issued injunctions against strikes, company towns disciplined dissent, and “free labor” often meant disposable labor. His intent is pragmatic militancy: clear-eyed about conflict, focused on bargaining power, and allergic to sentimental unity. The sentence works because it refuses the soothing middle; it forces a choice about whose interests policy and public sympathy will serve.