Quotes About Labor

If we are honest, we must admit that our employers have power over us. Some of them may be nice and some of them may be nasty, but none of them will spend money just because it would be good for us. They know that as individuals we are less powerful than they. We have only our ability to work to sell, but they have the jobs.

We usually think of suppliers as other firms, but labor must be recognized as a supplier as well, and one that exerts great power in many industries. There is substantial empirical evidence that scarce, highly skilled employees and/or tightly unionized labor can bargain away a significant fraction of potential profits in an industry.

Michael Gates Gill

Capital increasingly exploits the entire range of our productive capacities, our bodies and our minds, our capacities for communication, our intelligence and creativity, our affective relations with each other, and more. Life itself has been put to work.

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

The way societies have coped with this deepening indebtedness should be the starting point of financial theorizing. Money is not a "factor of production." It is a claim on the output or income that others produce. Debtors do the work, not the lenders. Before a formal market for wage labor developed in antiquity, money lending was the major way to obtain the services of bondservants who were compelled to work off the interest that was owed.

John Locke's guiding axiom was that all men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor. A corollary to this logic was that landlords have a right only to what they themselves produce, not to exploit and appropriate the labor of their tenants:

Debt leveraging is a major reason why the United States and Britain have lost their industrial advantage. Debt-inflated costs for housing, education and other basic needs have priced their labor out of markets abroad and at home.

In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

shifting our focus from maximizing GDP to creating a labor market conducive to the dignity of work and social cohesion.

Almost the first thing I learned about being an editor was that it was hard work. To be sure, ditchdiggers and miners have it worse, but for sheer, numbing, endless (I do not, deliberately, say mindless) work, editing books is hard to beat.

The work was done by hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrants known as the "Polish brigade." The men toiled through spring and summer of 1980 with sledgehammers and blowtorches, but without hard hats, working twelve- to eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, often sleeping on Bonwit Teller's floors. They were paid less than $5 an hour, sometimes in vodka. Many went unpaid and were threatened with deportation if they complained.

Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die. -Joe Hill, The Preacher and the Slave

On 25 June a bulldozer, known as the Yellow Monster, arrived to help us improve the track systems as we advanced; it probably did the work in a day that 100 men with picks and shovels might do in a week. At all events, it saved us a great deal of hard work.

To them all, Beldame represented the fair and possible reward for distress, misfortune, and labor in this world—it was to them a heaven on earth, and resembled the other, preached-of heaven in that it was bright, remote, timeless, and empty.

Vichy officials and collaborationists imprisoned 135,000 people (many for little more than their political beliefs), sent 650,000 more to Germany as "guest workers" under an obligatory labor scheme, and, most notoriously, sent 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. Less than 3 percent of those Jews survived.

The only entitlement guaranteed should be the fruits of one's own labor.

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

Capitalism always draws from the cheap labor pool; the profit is greater when the expense is limited

Work is a sacrament. Don't despise anyone's.

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

Educational equality doesn't guarantee equality on the labor market. Even the most developed countries are not gender-equal. There are still glass ceilings and 'leaky pipelines' that prevent women from getting ahead in the workplace.

A good sermon has the heft of a solid week's work (at least), yet wears its labor lightly. My homiletics professor said the rule was one hour of work per minute of sermon, say fifteen, sixteen hours on average, which always seemed scant to me. But I'm a slow writer. Then again, ministers don't usually write for publication and good delivery can finesse many an unpolished sentence and awkward transition.

Which I have earned with the sweat of my brows.