Workers Movement During The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age was a time of economic prosperity in the United States, and also served as the beginning of a unified workers movement standing behind the idea of simply wanting ‘more.’ Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor initiated the revolutionary demand for ‘more’ moving the worker’s movement passed the economic constraints of the past and propelling it into a movement of deeper social value. The movement became one for social welfare, personal liberty, and economic freedom. Uniting the AFL behind the image of ‘more’ allowed the members to indefinitely seek an improvement in their working and living environments, and were no longer constrained to a finite amount of change.
‘More’ became a movement that was able to spread beyond the economic sphere of influence. It removed workers from the confinement of the production line and placed them into the issues of a broader society; for the first time in American Industrial history, the laborer became a consumer rather than as an expendable piece of the greater production process. As explained by Gompers, “a man who goes to work at 8 o’clock in the morning… requires a newspaper; while a man who goes to work early… and stays at it late at night does not need a newspaper, for

Whereas opposition to the campaign believed the fact that foreign counterparts were worse off than American laborers should be enough to keep workers content, proponents of the AFL believed in the right to individual’s economic liberties. An individual’s right to economic liberty is based upon the idea of any consumer owning the ability to make their own purchasing decisions. A workers economic standing in the realm of production and consumption should not dictate whether or not they are able to purchase select goods and intangible joy, but should be given the opportunity to spend their income however they deem fit for