Quotes About Labor

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.

The best thing, and the most important thing the labor movement cannot do without, and must have and fight to keep, is solidarity.

Born on St. Valentine's Day in 1913, Jimmy Hoffa was seven years older than Frank Sheeran. Yet both grew to manhood in the same Great Depression, a time when management normally held the upper hand and people struggled just to put food on the table. Jimmy Hoffa's father, a coal miner, died when he was seven. His mother worked in an auto plant to support her children. Jimmy Hoffa quit school at age fourteen to go to work to help his mother. Hoffa

Hoffa and his Strawberry Boys' victory in 1932 was a rare labor victory in those days. In that same year a group of World War I veterans and their plight came to symbolize the powerlessness of the working man in the Depression. In 1932 thousands of veterans, tired of broken promises, marched on Washington and refused to leave the Mall until their promised bonuses, not due until 1945, were granted by Congress now when they needed them most.

As Hoffa put it, "Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the state of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were a part of it." And on another occasion he said, "My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year." And

And on the other side of the ledger, unions like the Teamsters often employed their own muscle, their own reigns of terror, including bombings, arsons, beatings, and murders. The warfare and violence were not just between labor and management. It was often between rival unions vying for the same membership. Sadly, it was often violence directed at rank-and-file union members who urged democratic reform of their unions. The

It was a car they said I got under the table. When they were trying to get the eight of us Hoffa suspects on anything they could, they used the car to send me to jail in 1981 on labor racketeering.) The

How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan's fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor.

Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused!

I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them.... It's work enough to read them sometimes.... As to the writing, it has its own charms.

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life—this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

In the Story of Ascent, a move back to the land would be a regression. We were supposed to be progressing away from labor, away from materiality, away from the dirt. In that story, heavenly was better than earthly, high better than low, clean better than dirty, the mind better than the body, and the highest social classes the ones furthest removed from the land.

The kind of taxes.. that we have today are nearly the opposite of what we want to create in our world. We can take from the commons, that which no one should own, without paying for it. Yet the one thing we can be said to own, our own productive labor, is subject to taxation in the form of income tax. Meanwhile, we are forced to pay a tax on the circulation of goods, a sales tax, while there is no tax on the accumulation of wealth not used for exchange.

Les premiers travailleurs de l'aube n'étaient pas encore sortis de chez eux. Toutefois, on voyait luire les lumières matinales. Des hommes et des femmes se préparaient aux travaux quotidiens. Troupeau écrasé par une fatigue sans fin, ils allaient bientôt gagner les moyens de transport qui les emporteraient vers les usines. C'est ce qu'on appelle vivre.

Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford

All equally see in the convulsion in America an era in the history of the world, out of which must come in the end a general recognition of the right of mankind to the produce of their labor and the pursuit of happiness.

Verbs. All of them tiring.

Just as this social creation, the state, cannot coherently be limited by reference to rights that are its own invention, and society is fundamentally organized by entities whose reality is society's own construct, so it is with the value of physical objects and human labor, the division of the sexes and indeed the identity of the individual person, subsisting over time as the distinct and ultimate subject of discourse and attribution.

There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work.

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and there are busy poor and busy rich.... in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working class — strong and happy — among both rich and poor; there is an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich and poor.

Although I myself, due doubtless to defective skill, have to work pretty hard, I do not believe in too hard work... A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.