Quotes About Labor

When I hear that there are 5,000,000 working women in this country, I always take occasion to say that there are 18,000,000 but only 5,000,000 receive their wages.

I do not know the needs of a god or of another world... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one.

Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame; Ev'y thin' thet' s done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same.

The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits, at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

I think we need to be fighting for the working men and women of this country, not the moneyed New York interests.

It's not a hard job, radio or standup, there are hard parts of it, sure. There are guys who do ten hours of construction a day don't want to hear me talk about my job being difficult. Compared to what a lot of people do, this is genuinely easy.

I got my start in lefty journalism as a labor reporter at 'In These Times', and it's in my blood.

All my life, I've been lucky to work in social justice, starting as a labor organizer working with low-wage working women.

The first Friday of every month is what we call Numbers Day - it's the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report. We have a ritual at the Labor Department - at 8 A.M., we gather around a table in my office, and the commissioner of labor statistics briefs me and the department's senior leadership on the numbers.

Once I had a steel job for half of a day. I never went back to collect my pay.

While the men of the steel industry were going through blood and gas in defense of their rights and their homes and their families, elsewhere on the far-flung C.I.O. front the hosts of labor were advancing and intelligent and permanent progress was being made.

We don't want people working in fast-food stands. We want them back in the steel mills.

I never, ever, had a person who could come up with the name of a person who could not get a job because an illegal immigrant had stepped in front of them, because it was either a job that person didn't want to do or didn't exist.

guaranteed jobs and decent wages

Certain celebrated capitalist thinkers even declared, at the height of the boom, that blue collars and white collars had swapped moral positions, with workers now the "parasites" freeloading on the Olympian labors of management.13

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9 percent of the private-sector workforce from a high water mark of 38 percent in the fifties.

Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4

Be the business never so painful, you may have it done for money.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,The plowman homeward plods his weary way,And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil

With fingers weary and worn,With eyelids heavy and red,A woman sat in unwomanly ragsPlying her needle and thread—Stitch! stitch! stitch!In poverty, hunger, and dirt.

She sang the Song of the Shirt.

A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government