Quotes About Labor

Television is blue-collar work. You clock in in the morning; you work 12, 13 hours - sometimes 18 hours if you're doing 'Orphan Black.'

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.

I am one of those men who believes that the best workingman ought to have the best pay.

Our people were very restive, saying that they could not sit under that notice, and that if the National Board did not call them out soon they would go out of themselves.

What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest.

I like being outside and I like hard work.

Career is just posh slavery.

The Republican Party looks at massive immigration, legal and illegal, as a source of cheap labor, satisfying a very important constituency.

You know, rural Americans are a special people. Their labor puts food on our table and fuel in our gas tanks. Their service in our military sets a powerful example of leadership, honor and sacrifice. Their spirit of community inspires us all.

Shortly, some pipeline worker or shipfitter would slow down.

Where economic efficiency gives males a bargaining advantage on account of greater mobility of their human capital from a gendered division of labor, families do best by socializing a daughter to cultivate the femininity that will help her win her a good man and the docility that will help her keep him. Because human history has been agrarian for most of recorded time, these are the values—let's call it patriarchy—most familiar to humanity.

The increased global linkages promote economic growth in the world through two key mechanisms: the division of labor and the international spillovers of knowledge.

He wished only to live as a free man upon the fruits of his labor, and grow old in the natural rhythms of the earth; instead of which he was cursed, so he felt, always to be an object of disgust, or horror, which is only disgust with a portion of fear superadded- always to be in the eyes of the world a monster.

They were poor thin little undernourished creatures with only a few blue teeth among them, though young: they had been taken up for combining with others to ask for higher wages and sentenced to transportation; but as they were somewhat less criminal than those who had actually made the demand they were allowed to join the Navy instead.

Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent.

And the decline of unions has made a huge difference. Consider the case of trucking, which used to be a good job but now pays a third less than it did in the 1970s, with terrible working conditions. What made the difference? De-unionization was a big part of the story.

Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent. That divergence was politics, pure and simple.

But why, if the real weekly value of my labour is thirty hours of other people's work, would I ever work sixty hours?

To regulate the flow of fieldworkers, the Bracero Program (Mexicans working on short-term contracts) was established in 1942 under an agreement between the US and Mexico.

Fruit pickers here, lab technicians over there.

The solution is simple: if we passed a law requiring United States farmers to hire only men with entry visas and work permits, there would be no problem. There is no such law. The farm lobby has made sure of that, for if there were no Mexicans to exploit, how would these barrel-assed slavers be able to harvest their crops?

The next time you clap on your expensive Bose headphones or fire up your car stereo, you had to consider that they were put together a hundred yards from Arizona by someone living in a hut in the Sonoran Desert

Some of those people ended up in the maquiladoras

You can work hard here and still earn very little.