|
*
In
less than a century we experienced great movement.
The youth movement! The labor movement! The
civil rights movement! The peace movement! The
solidarity movement! The women's movement! The
disability movement! The disarmament movement!
The gay rights movement! The environmental movement!
Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason
to believe we are done?
-- Holly Near
|
 |
The
essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily
of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
-- George Orwell
Strike
not for a few cents more an hour, because the
price of living will be raised faster still, but
strike for all you earn, be content with nothing
less.
-- Lucy Parsons |
|
The
present age handed over the workers, each alone and
defenseless, to the unbridled greed of competitors...
so that a very few and exceedingly rich men have laid
a yoke of almost slavery on the unnumbered masses
of non-owning workers.
-- Pope Leo XIII
The
important role of union organizations must be admitted:
their object is the representation of the various
categories of workers, their lawful collaboration
in the economic advance of society, and the development
of the sense of their responsibility for the realization
of the common good.
-- Pope Paul VI
|
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*
"Out
of our first century of national life we evolved
the ethical principle that it was not right
or just that an honest and industrious man
should live and die in misery. He was entitled
to some degree of sympathy and security. Our
conscience declared against the honest workman's
becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us that
he very often did."
-- Frances
Perkins
"Our
idea of what constitutes social good has advanced
with the procession of the ages, from those
desperate times when just to keep body and
soul together was an achievement, to the great
present when "good" includes an agreeable,
stable civilization accessible to all, the
opportunity of each to develop his particular
genius and the privilege of mutual usefulness."
-- Frances
Perkins
|
|
|
*
“Kids
don’t have a little brother working in the coal
mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing
her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns
of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized;
we broke the back of the sweatshops in this
country; we have child labor laws. Those were
not benevolent gifts from enlightened management.
They were fought for, they were bled for, they
were died for by working people, by people like
us. Kids ought to know that. That’s why I sing
these songs. That’s why I tell these stories,
dammit. No root, no fruit!”
-- Utah
Phillips
|
*
The
labor movement means just this: It is the last
noble protest of the American people against the
power of incorporated wealth.
-- Wendell Phillips
Organize,
and stand together. Claim something together,
and at once; let the nation hear a united demand
from the laboring voice, and then, when you
have got that, go on after another; but get
something.
-- Wendell
Phillips
|
|
The
right to a job without a right to a living wage is
just as weak as the right to a living wage without
a job. Both rights must remain intact and linked together.
-- William P. Quigley
*
It's
incredible to see labor unions and environmentalists
getting together to stop the corporate mentality
that destroys both jobs and the environment.
-- Bonnie Raitt
|
|
|
|
*
The
essence of trade unionism is social uplift.
The labor movement has been the haven for
the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected,
the downtrodden, the poor.
-- A. Philip
Randolph
"Nothing
counts but pressure, pressure, more pressure,
and still more pressure through broad organized
aggressive mass action."
--
A. Philip
Randolph
|
|
*
As
long as people and the planet are being exploited,
and billions of dollars are being made precisely
because laborers and the environment are being
abused and used up, there will be children going
hungry and ecological destruction.
~
Ocean Robbins
|
 |
As
long as people and the planet are being exploited,
and billions of dollars are being made precisely because
laborers and the environment are being abused and
used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological
destruction. As long as war and violence are in our
hearts and our streets as well as in our nations,
as long as corporate greed and unsustainable consumption
are at the forefront of our economies, no child will
be born into a truly safe, peaceful or loving world.
~
Ocean Robbins
"'If
democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then
why should people give up these rights when they enter
their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers
for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for
freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of
what work to pursue - control of our lives, in short.
And then we wake up in the morning and go to work,
and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist
on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism.
That is what capitalism is - a version of feudalism
in which capital replaces land, and business leaders
replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we
still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to
feed rulers who do no real work.... 'So. We must challenge.
It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if
simple justice is a value, then they are values everywhere,
including in the workplace where we spend so much
of our lives'...."
-- Kim Stanley Robinson
*
You
in the unions do not yet represent all of labor.
But I hope some day you will, because I believe
that it is through strength, through the fact
that people who know what people need are working
to make this country a better place for all people,
that we will help the world to accept our leadership
and understand that, under our form of government
and through our way of life, we have something
to offer them…
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt |
|
I
have always felt that it was important that everyone
who was a worker join a labor organization.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt
I
believe you should tell the story of injustices, of
inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people
as a whole in this country really face the problems
that people who are pushed to the point of striking
know all about, but others know practically nothing
about.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt
The
labor movement has a great role to play in our country
today.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt
|
|
*
No
business which depends for existence on paying
less than living wages to its workers has any
right to continue in this country. By living
wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level
--I mean the wages of decent living.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
|
It
is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic
nation that is have free and independent labor unions.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
It
is to the real advantage of every producer, every
manufacturer and every merchant to cooperate in the
improvement of working conditions, because the best
customer of American industry is the well-paid worker.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
|
*
"The
internal and external ethics of an organization
must be the same; you cannot talk about minimum
wages for poor people and not pay minimum wages
to your own workers."
-- Aruna Roy
|
|
"We
call people who work with mud and earth, and sand
and stone, unskilled labor in India. I cannot in this
lifetime wield the implements that they use either
to dig the earth or to shovel the earth. I can't carry
the loads. That's extremely specialized. But they
are called unskilled, and I am called skilled because
I can write with the pen. I cannot accept this. I
find it extremely non-egalitarian to say they are
unskilled and I am skilled. It's only a way of looking
at it. Knowledge is also like that."
-- Aruna Roy
Labor
Quotes
