Labor's "SAVIOR"

(Sources from my last year's History Class handout notes)
THE KNIGHT OF LABOR:
The Knight of Labor (est. 1869), unlike trade union like the American Federation of Labor, opened its membership to ALL of the workers: skill and/or unskilled, immigrant and native born, men and women, black and whites. Though its goals – eight hour work day, equal pay for equal work, etc. – where similar to other unions of the day, the Knights largely opposed strikes as a bargaining method. They advocated higher taxes o higher incomes and sought to establish “Worker Cooperatives,” business owned and operated by the workers themselves.

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR – A. F. L.
The more practical minded American Federation of Labor (est. 1886) had fewer illusions; it recognized the permanence of the working class and the increasing difficulty of escape from that status, discarded cooperative utopias for “ Pure and Simple” unionism – the immediate improvement of wages, hours, and working conditions—and willingly employed the strike weapon to enforce collective bargaining and advance the economic position of its own exclusive membership, confined as it was largely to skilled workers organized along craft lines. The A. F. L., adroitly guided by Samuel Gompers, made a business a trade unionism—and a relatively successful one at that. “The trade unions,” Gompers explained in 1906, “are the business organizations of the wage earners, to attend to the business of the wage workers.” The prevailing philosophy of American trade unionism was never more adroitly put.

Excerpt from Gompers memoirs, 70 years of Life & Labor； speaking here on the difference between A. F. L. and the Knight of Labor:
Trade unions endeavored to organize for collective responsibility persons with common trade problems. They sought economic betterment in order to place in the hands of wage-earners the means to wider opportunities.
The Knights of Labor was a social or fraternal organization….its purpose was reform. The nights of Labor prided itself upon something higher and grander than a trade union or political party….
The order admitted to membership any person, excluding only lawyers and saloon-keepers. This policy included employers…The order was a hodgepodge with no basis for solidarity…