Quotes About Labor

The number of illegal firings tripled during the [Ronald] Reagan years. It was at that time that you started getting these companies that specialized in how to destroy unions.

The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure.

Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses - it's progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.

Human resources could be purchased and sold but not time.

I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.

What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough.

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies—in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicate a preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world—among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.

knowing that the hour of fulfillment is buried in years of patience — yet willing to labor like that on the mortal wheel.

The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant than it sounds.

Believe me, I will never desert life until this last hope is torn from my bosom, that in some way my labours may form a link of gold with which we ought all to strive to drag Happiness from where she sits enthroned above the clouds, now far beyond our reach, to inhabit the earth with us.

After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.

The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour.

That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs

a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work'.

When I ply the cutlass and make the equivalent of sixpence, idiot conscience applauds me. But if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds by writing, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. No, to come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush. To change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, that makes for a quiet conscience.

Toil, comrade," he said, "is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat." The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer.

Anyone else would have taken a job in an

There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race.