Adolph Strasser
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Adolph Strasser (1843-1939), born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, was an American trade union organizer. Strasser is best remembered as a founder of the United Cigarmakers Union and the American Federation of Labor (AF of L). Strasser was additionally the president of the Cigar Makers' International Union for a period of 14 years, heading the union during the period in which it introduced its successful union label and gained substantial organizational strength.
Biography
Early years
Adolph Strasser was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire in part of today's Hungary in 1843. He was a native speaker of German.[1]
Strasser emigrated to the United States in about 1872.[2] After his arrival in America Strasser learned the craft of cigar making, working in New York City.[2]
During his younger years Strasser was a committed socialist, maintaining membership in the International Workingman's Association in which Karl Marx played a pivotal role.[2] In 1874 Strasser helped to organize the Social Democratic Workingmen's Party of the United States, one of the first International Socialist political parties in North America.[2]
Career
In the course of this activity, Strasser became involved in the trade union movement, initially helping to found the United Cigarmakers Union, concentrating for its members upon those tenement-based workers excluded from membership in the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU).[2] Strasser soon joined forces with the CMIU, editing the monthly magazine established by that union in 1875, the Cigar Makers' Official Journal.[3]
In 1876 and 1877 Strasser was instrumental in helping to establish a central body bringing together New York City's various local trade unions.[2]
Strasser was elected vice president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1876 and president in 1877.[2] He continued to serve in that capacity until stepping down from the job in 1891.[2]
During Strasser's term as head of the CMIU the organization began to win strikes which it had previously lost. Between 1871 and 1875 the union had waged 78 strikes, winning just 12, but in the years from 1876 to 1881 a total of 69 strikes had been fought, with 58 resolved in favor of the striking cigar workers.[3]
Gompers and Strasser were outspoken opponents of the tenement system of production, in which raw materials were provided to workers for manufacture at home.[3] Under their leadership the CMIU attempted to outlaw the practice of home work outright rather than making any effort to organize cigar workers engaged in that form of production.[3]
In 1881 the CMIU adopted use of a special "Blue Label" to denote union-made cigars.[4]
Following his retirement as CMIU president in 1891 he continued to work for the union as an organizer and auditor.[2] He also was active in the American Federation of Labor as a lecturer, lobbyist, and arbitrator of jurisdictional disputes between competing craft unions.[2]
Later years
Strasser left the trade union movement in 1914, becoming a real estate agent in Buffalo, New York for the next five years.[2]
In 1919 Strasser retired and moved to the Southern coastal state of Florida, where he lived out the last two decades of his life.[2]
Death and legacy
Adolph Strasser died in 1939.
Footnotes
- ^ Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987; pg. 20.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "Adolph Strasser" in Stuart B. Kaufman (ed.), The Samuel Gompers Papers: Volume 1: The Making of a Union Leader, 1850-86. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1986; pg. 504.
- ^ a b c d Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker, pg. 22.
- ^ Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker, pg. 21.