Quotes About Trade union

My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.

Public discourse degenerated. There's no longer a place for intelligent debate at universities, where people just work for degrees and careers. My own experience was how my trade union's lively branch debates dwindled to a few people round cups of coffee. There's a climate of people frightened to say what they think for fear of offending someone.

The trade union leaders filed into the Great Parlour at Chequers and took their seats around the polished mahogany table. Before he sat down Bill Knight of the Engineers' Union caressed the oak wall panelling. "This is what I call class," he said and as he spoke his hand drifted to the blue and white porcelain on the mantelpiece. Despite impeccable proletarian origins most union leaders quickly adapted to the comforts of high office.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.

If] we were to make "recognition of the dictatorship [of the proletariat]" a condition of trade union membership, we should be committing a folly, we should be damaging our influence over the masses, we should be helping the Mensheviks. For the whole task of the Communists is to be able to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them…

You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament.

From the family, through the school and religious institutions, the mass media, to the factory and finally trade union and "revolutionary" party, capitalist society conspires to foster obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic, and authoritarian discipline in the working class as a whole; indeed, in many of its "emancipatory" movements as well.

turned out, the resolve of these two hard-line politicians was soon to be tested. The seeds of the crisis they would face were sown in the unlikely location of a Polish shipyard in Gdansk, by a union official named Lech Walesa. The Solidarity trade union had been formed on September 17, 1980, after an earlier wave of strikes. It was