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March 1982, Vol. 105, No. 3

The AFL and a national BLS:
labor's role is crystallized

Joseph P. Goldberg and William T. Moye

The American trade union movement, which last year celebrated the centennial of its founding, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which soon will observe its own 100th anniversary, grew up together, sometimes in confrontation, but more often in mutual—though distant—respect. The relationship between the American Federation of Labor and the Bureau was affected both by the needs of the times and by the personalities of the leaders, AFL President Samuel Gompers and BLS Commissioners Carroll D. Wright and Charles P. Neill.

This article reports on some of the common and divergent interests of the two organizations, from their beginnings until 1913, when BLS became part of the present Department of Labor.

This excerpt is from an article published in the March 1982 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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