Quotes About Labor

It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

They [wood stumps] warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

Take into your new sphere of labour, where you also mean to lay down your life, that simple charm, Love, and your life-work must succeed. You can take nothing greater, you need take nothing less. It is not worth while going if you take anything less.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages.

We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out -- they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.

The natural thing to do is to work—to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort.

Every time you can so arrange that one man will do the work of two, you so add to the wealth of the country that there will be a new and better job for the man who is displaced.

The fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used to be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed. He is merely not employed on that work, and the public is not carrying the burden of his support by paying more than it ought on that work—for after all, it is the public that pays!

The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

There is this difference where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages anyhow—they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.

Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. John Stuart Mill.

If each laborer in performing the labor really creates the fund from which his wages are drawn, then wages cannot be diminished by the increase of laborers, but, on the contrary, as the efficiency of labor manifestly increases with the number of laborers, the more laborers, other things being equal, the higher should wages be.

All I wish to make clear is that, without any increase in population, the progress of invention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and smaller proportion to labor and capital.

Capital is but a form of labor, and its distinction from labor is in reality but a subdivision, just as the division of labor into skilled and unskilled would be.

we have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and a more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him with the name of freedom

Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?

Laura tried her utmost, with an industry born of despair.

You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.

Culture is any and all human effort and labor expended upon the cosmos, to unearth its treasures and its riches and bring them into the service of man for the enrichment of human existence unto the glory of God.

His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man.

Something attempted, something done,Has earned a night's repose.