Quotes About Labor

Yet in this global economy, no jobs are safe. High-speed Internet connections and low-cost, skilled labor overseas are an explosive combination.

What we see in stark relief is that the production of goods is about social relationships.

Apple necessarily must pay the workers producing the iPods less money than they gain from the labor of that particular worker. In this, we see the basic profit motive of capital.

It was the kind of horse they have in mines—he must have worked underground somewhere because his eyes were so beautiful, the kind I would see in stokers and people who worked in artificial light all day or in the light of safety lamps and emerged from the pit or the furnace room to look up at the beautiful sky because to such eyes all skies are beautiful.

From outside comes the strident clamor of slogans over a loudspeaker and an accordion optimistically paints cheap color prints. And yet there is not a single flower on the laborers' table, not one little bouquet for the world to lean on.

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work

During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a child looks to its mother. This was not unnatural. The central government gave them freedom, and the whole Nation had been enriched for more than two centuries by the labour of the Negro.

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him. When I have read of labour troubles between employers and employees, I have often thought that many strikes and similar disturbances might be avoided if the employers would cultivate the habit of getting nearer to their employees, of consulting and advising with them, and letting them feel that the interests of the two are the same.

They had not fully outgrown the idea that it was hardly the proper thing for them to use their hands, since they had come there, as one of them expressed it, "to be educated, and not to work." Gradually, though, I noted with satisfaction that a sentiment in favour of work was gaining ground.

The idea, however, was too prevalent that, as soon as one secured a little education, in some unexplainable way he would be free from most of the hardships of the world, and, at any rate, could live without manual labour.

Properly, eccentricity is not so much a component of genius, as it is a consequence of the habits of men of genius. The reputation for genius is usually acquired by severe and protracted intellectual labor. This occasions repeated reactions from an extreme tension to an extreme relaxation of spirits--the transitions expressing themselves in sharp and abrupt impulses.

The trappings might have been eighties New Wave, but this was still a working-class bar, where hardy men and seen-too-much women came after a full day of labor and damned if it wasn't deserved. You couldn't fake belonging here. I might be wearing jeans, but I still didn't come close to fitting in. Win, however, stuck out like a Twinkie at a health club. Patrons

In terms of labor relations, the basic problem with living your life is that it's on the-job training and by the time you get some skill at it, you're permanently laid off.

Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion

It's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand.

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

I talk to people who are musicians, and they go, Oh this is hell. And I go, Are you kidding me? You never put tar paper on a roof, did ya?

Although most Americans apparently loathe inflation, Yale economists have argued that a little inflation may be necessary to grease the wheels of the labor market and enable efficiency-enhancing changes in relative pay to occur without requiring nominal wage cuts by workers.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

We'd get $3.50 a bushel. A bushel is a lot of peas. You know how many peas you have to pick to fill a bushel? We would work from 6 to 2, then I'd have to go home and cut the yard.

But whether, for example, a coat can be exchanged for twenty yards of linen cloth or for forty yards is not a matter of chance, but depends upon objective conditions, upon the amount of socially necessary labor time contained in the coat and in the linen respectively.

Pooper scooper? Yeah, I've done it a few times. Every once in a while, you have to.