James Maurer: Reading's Labor Champion

James Maurer was born in eighteen sixty-four and educated himself through decades of work and reading. He became one of Pennsylvania's most effective labor advocates, fighting for child labor reform, old-age pensions, and the state's first workers' compensation law. From nineteen twelve through nineteen twenty-eight he served as president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor.

Reading sent him to the state legislature as a Socialist representative for two separate terms between nineteen eleven and nineteen nineteen. He ran for vice president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket twice, in nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen thirty-two. He never won national office, but many of the reforms he spent his life arguing for eventually became law.

Maurer lived his entire life in Reading, a lifelong voice for workers in the city that made him.