Quotes About Labor

In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.

In the world system of increasingly discrete labor, in which each person contributes an ever smaller part to an ever vaster manufacturing of so-called "goods," the act of disentangling oneself from the whole might, in hindsight, appear quite radical. But for the person concerned, in that moment, exiting the system feels like the only available path.

How funny it is that one of the fundamental definitions of being "modern" is the ability to avoid physical labor, when it might be that very thing that could provide us with such depth of connection to ourselves and to the world.

The AFL-CIO is a structure that divides workers' strength by allowing each union to organize in any industry, then bargain on its own, even when workers share a common employer.

No descansó al séptimo día. Al séptimo día se cansó.

Excretion is his first concrete production and, through it, the child gains his first experience of labour relations. He may reserve the right to go on excremental strike or to engage in a form of faecal offensive. The excremental faculty is a manipulative device and to be baulked of the free control of it is to be deprived of the first, most elementary, expression of autonomy.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

Globalization gives workers in Asia better access to rich-country markets than ever before, and they can do many of the jobs that used to be done in the rich countries, even without being able to migrate. If this happens on a large scale, Asian wages will rise, and American and European wages will fall, narrowing earnings inequality in the world as a whole. The

With the education I had, all I could do was work as a burro, in whatever I could find: shoeshine boy, janitor, dishwasher, waiter, bartender, cashier, bricklayer, painter.

Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.

There are mothers who sew for six months to make a fashion collection - someone's grandmother, someone's sister. We come in and get paid to walk for 10 minutes at the end. Whenever I think about that, I realise it's not about me. I was just the one chosen to represent those women and sell the clothes.

I've always had jobs with hierarchies - wherever I worked, like McDonald's, or cleaning toilets. It's always been hard.

Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.

Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.

We have to build further on the collaboration with business and labor to restore confidence and prevent an investment downgrade.

Three years after the four deepest previous recessions began - in 1953, 1957, 1973 and 1981 - employment was on average 4.7% higher than the pre-recession peak.

What made women's labour particularly attractive to the capitalists was not only its lower price but also the greater submissiveness of women.

It is plain that we don't care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.

A man who is without capital, and who, by prohibitions upon banking, is practically forbidden to hire any, is in a condition elevated but one degree above that of a chattel slave. He may live; but he can live only as the servant of others; compelled to perform such labor, and to perform it at such prices, as they may see fit to dictate.