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This study aims to analyze Samuel Gompers’ use of innovative management practices involving authority and voluntarism at the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a way of suggesting a role for a labor leader as a management guru. It is a case study attempt to insert a labor presence into the canon of management leaders whose accomplishments are taught in academic programs and appear in the field’s textbooks.

The methodology involved close reading and dialogue with primary sources on Samuel Gompers and the AFL from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with more recent reviews and critiques of the union’s foundation period.

The paper analyzes Gompers’ approach to nonhierarchical decision-making through his doctrine of voluntarism. The paper discusses jurisdictional disputes in the AFL in the early 20th century, exploring internal rebuffs Gompers originally received to his suggestion of voluntary solution building. The narrative recounts his tenacity in pursuing voluntarism and his use of sub-federative departments after 1907 to damp down jurisdictional disputes without fiat from himself or the AFL executive board.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is one of the first in the management history literature to present a labor leader with blue-collar origins as a management guru, expanding the representativeness of the progenitors of the field.

This study aims to demonstrate that in the latter years of his life, Frederick Winslow Taylor embraced union participation in management decision-making and that interwar US Taylor Society members and organized labor extended his support for this endeavor.

This study engages with primary materials not previously present in the management history literature and secondary works generated by researchers in disciplines commonly ignored by management scholars.

This study contests the claim that the scientific managers reached out to unions only after Taylor’s death and demonstrates Taylor welcomed union participation in the management of enterprises, held it was necessary to “show” and not merely “tell” unions that scientific management could be “good” for them, that his inner circle and organized labor jointly promoted these propositions within F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, and that the US union movement was eventually compelled to settle for a form of industrial relations pluralism that limited their participation to bargaining over the conditions of employment and consequently doomed them to a disastrous future.

This study might support trade unionists develop strategies that may dampen employer hostility and thus revitalize the labor movement and assist management studies rediscover insights that once enabled the discipline to evolve beyond the enterprise. The latter is necessary for this study to live in an age when an increasing number of liberal market economies are characterized by austerity and retrenchment.

This study provides new evidence that demonstrates that Frederick Taylor embraced union participation in enterprise management and also that Taylor Society members actually made a significant contribution to Roosevelt’s New Deal labor policies.