Quotes About Labor

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

Although millions more had jobs, the share of all German workers in the national income fell from 56.9 per cent in the depression year of 1932 to 53.6 per cent in the boom year of 1938.

Atlas Shrugged also brought into focus the many inefficiencies of the unionized labour system. I had a union job on the pipeline—which was exactly why I had so much time to read. But there were times in Alaska when I saw a simple task being performed by three people because the union required one guy to drive a machine, a different guy to flip a switch, and a third guy to make sure the machine didn't run out of gas.

Then there were those girls who became midwives: girls who could not get enough of the tiniest of babies - girls who would grow into women who absolutely reveled in the magnificent process of birth...The difference between a woman who becomes an OB and the women who becomes and midwife has less to do with education, philosophy or upbringing than with the depth of her appreciation for the miracle of labor and for life in its moment of emergence.

It is notorious that the insatiable factory wears out its workers with great rapidity. As it scraps machinery so it scraps human beings. The young, the vigorous, the adaptable, the supple of limb, the alert of mind, are in demand," wrote economist Edward Devine in 1909. "Middle age is old age, and the wornout worker, if he has no children and if he has no savings, becomes an item in the aggregate of the unemployed.

Two shovels and a pickax.

Did they like being maids & butlers? Before you answer this consider everything you've ever read about English history after Robin Hood and before he Who. Your choices were: serving, being served, being killed by Jack the Ripper. So, the employee class made the best of it and got with the program. It was indoor work, after all. And as a wise man once observed, "You're gonna hafta serve somebody." (Bob Dylan, C. 1497-1580). And it beat mining.

That's the funny thing about The Money. They'll gift each other artifact and libation equal to most people's annual income. But anyone who ain't them's gotta work for it.

I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? "Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law.

Marx - L'ouvrier est ainsi triplement aliéné : - Par rapport à lui-même (il a vendu sa force de travail au capitaliste) ; - Par rapport à la marchandise (le produit de son travail appartient à un autre, le capitaliste) ; - Par rapport au capitaliste lui-même (le salariat est une forme substitutive de l'esclavage dans laquelle les individus ne sont pas juridiquement la propriété des maîtres).

The southern leaders perceived the transcontinental as the means of extending their plantation economy westward, replicating the same kind of small-town America characteristic of the antebellum South and, crucially, retaining the slave labor that was integral to their way of life: "The South saw land in a traditional light, as home and heritage, not as a natural resource to benefit capital and state.

Toutes les sociétés actuelles, y compris les sociétés "socialistes", reposent, pour l'élevage des enfants et les services domestiques, sur le travail gratuit des femmes

Ce n'est pas parce que le capitalisme achète et exploite la force de travail du mari qu'il exploite du même coup la femme. C'est absolument faux. Elle est exploitée par son rapport de production [l'exploitation domestique], c'est évident, pas par celui de son mari.

Alors que le salarié dépend du marché (d'un nombre théoriquement illimité d'employeurs), la femme mariée dépend d'un individu. Alors que le salarié vend sa force de travail, la femme mariée la donne : exclusivité et gratuité sont intimement liées.

On peut commencer à préciser la signification de la "gratuité" du travail ménager : c'est un travail qui, non payé, n'est pas non plus rémunéré, parce qu'il est effectué pour autrui.

We need to change our idea of what 'work' is. Work is not what creates value for an employer. It's what creates a society. It's what takes up your time.

cities are fueled by the listless agony of workers providing services to other workers who barely acknowledge those services.

Life', Alice resolutely told her mother in 1866, 'is meant for work, and not for pleasure.

When you see what some women marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.

Society has been enabled by tireless contributions of labor and generous financial support provided by many individuals whose only compensation has been the satisfaction of fostering the circulation of this sacred writing in the world. Publication of this edition,

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

The artist labors while he may, But finds at best too brief the day; And, tho' his works outlast the time And nation that they make sublime, He feels and sees that Nature knows Nothing of time in what she does, But has a leisure infinite Wherein to do her work aright.

Work, whiskey, and cards were life.

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do.