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Quotes About Labor

the government of the country was conservative and, like all such governments, found it easier to get along with well-heeled and well-dressed Fascists than with ex-labor leaders and agitators, refugees who generally were destitute and frequently had jail records. This is something which applies to nearly all governments;
~ Upton Sinclair
Cannes was thought of as a playground for the rich; a city of lovely villas and gardens, a paradise of fashionable elegance. Few stopped to realize what a mass of labor was required to maintain that cleanliness and charm: not merely the servants who dwelt on the estates, but porters and truckdrivers, scrubwomen and chambermaids, kitchen-workers, food-handlers; and scores of obscure occupations which the rich never heard about. These people were housed in slum warrens
~ Upton Sinclair
So the quest for biological laws shouldn't be driven by a quest for simplicity or elegance. No woman who has been through labor would say that it's an elegant solution to giving birth to a baby.
~ V.S. Ramachandran
In 1800 New England farmers (seeding by hand, with ox-drawn wooden plows and brush harrows, sickles, and flails) needed 150–170 hours of labor to produce their wheat harvest. By 1900 in California, horse-drawn gang-plowing, spring-tooth harrowing, and combine harvesting could produce the same amount of wheat in less than nine hours
~ Vaclav Smil
In 1871 about 24% of all workers were in "muscle power" jobs (in agriculture, construction, and industry) and only about 1% were in "caring" professions (in health and teaching, child and home care, and welfare), but by 2011 caring jobs claimed 12% and muscle jobs only 8% of the labor force, and many of today's muscle jobs, such as cleaning and domestic service and routine factory line jobs, involve mostly mechanized tasks.
~ Vaclav Smil
Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country's population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.50 This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.
~ Vaclav Smil
Il peggio della burocrazia è quando in uno Stato operaio sono gli operai a soffrire».
~ Vasily Grossman
effect the exchange of labor and services by means of an exchange of heartbeats. estimate every task in terms of heartbeats-the monetary unit of the future, in which all individuals are equally wealthy.
~ Velimir Khlebnikov
Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he
~ Victor Hugo
Protect the workers, encourage the rich.
~ Victor Hugo
Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it. The
~ Victor Hugo
You do not wish to earn your living, to have a task, to fulfil a duty! It bores you to be like other men? Well! You will be different. Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find ennui his torment. You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a slave.
~ Victor Hugo
These two products of a man's labor often come together. At the very moment when you become rich you are paralyzed. That rounds off your life.
~ Victor Hugo
Work is the law; whoever spurns it as tiresome will have it as punishment
~ Victor Hugo
You understand. I know you do. Your people are starving, dying. Thousands are homeless. They can't make enough money picking to survive. Help me convince them to strike for better wages. They'll listen to you.
~ Kristin Hannah
How is it illegal to ask for better wages?" Natalia lit up another cigarette. "It isn't, technically. But this is a capitalist country, run by big-money interests. After the state's anti-immigration campaign, when they rounded up all the illegals and deported them back to Mexico, the growers would have had a real problem, but then . . .
~ Kristin Hannah
Oh, and they culled our names from the relief rolls today. If you can pick cotton, you have to. No state relief." "We heard. The growers bullied the state into it. They're calling it the No Work, No Eat policy. They're afraid that relief will allow you to feed your children while you strike for better wages.
~ Kristin Hannah
We wouldn't have people like the big growers making all the money and people like us doing all the work. We starve while the rich get richer.
~ Kristin Hannah
You see now," Jack said. "A fight like this isn't romantic. I was in San Francisco when the National Guard went after strikers with bayonets." "People died that day," Natalia said. "Strikers. They called it Bloody Thursday.
~ Kristin Hannah
AFTER TEN HOURS OF hard labor beneath a hot sun, Elsa climbed down from the truck. She had her work chit in one gloved hand. It wasn't worth much, but it was something. The company store charged the camp residents ten percent to convert the chit to credit, but they couldn't cash it anywhere else; if they wanted cash instead of credit, they had to pay interest. So, in point of fact, as little as they were paid, it was really even ten percent less.
~ Kristin Hannah
It was always about the men. They seemed to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown too, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved.
~ Kristin Hannah
pockets than takin' care of the farmworkers.
~ Kristin Hannah
A man's got to fight out here to make a living, they'd say to each other. A man. It was always about the men. They seemed to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved.
~ Kristin Hannah
Cook things, eat them with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the beans, so much the better for you.
~ Kristin Kimball