Quotes About Labor

Before the war there were many who were more or less ignorant of the international labor movement but who nevertheless turned to it for salvation when the threat of war arose. They hoped that the workers would never permit a war.

For me the march was a labor - a labor of love - but I was busy handing out flyers for the National Association of Black Social Workers, so I really wasn't standing in the crowd listening and observing. I was busy.

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

Workers come to America to fill jobs unwanted by Americans, but they are staying and they are not going home.

We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers.

American workers are first rate.

I was in an organization called Progressive Labor Party and International Committee Against Racism. And I was - I started out helping to organize a farm workers' union in Central California.

The Bush administration staunchly opposed legislation which would preserve overtime pay for all workers.

We are implementing an in-depth reform on labor market, not to reduce rights for workers but to provide more visibility and more efficiency to investors and employers because it's the key for job creation.

I intend to fight to ensure that Connecticut workers have a level playing field when competing for jobs.

These interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries.

Dr. King's last campaign was a labor struggle. Many people are aware that King was assassinated in Memphis in the spring of 1968. Less well-known is what drew him there: solidarity with city sanitation workers, who, without the benefit of union representation, were rising up to protest humiliating pay and deplorable working conditions.

It's understood in Minnesota that we're going to start losing businesses if we can't find more workers.

South Carolina is a 'right to work' state - a misnomer of a phrase, as the laws limits union representation of workers. It does does not guarantee workers a job or fair wages and conditions.

Right to Work laws give workers a choice. Choice creates competition and competition breeds success. Forced unionization creates a monopoly, which only leads to stagnation.

Unemployment is 'involuntary' when the price is above its market clearing level. Workers are unemployed because jobs are not available at the prevailing wages, period. The only recourse is to either expand the number of jobs or somehow lower the wage.

Two new workers are being added to the population for every one job that is created.

Some contractors force workers to provide paybacks to keep their jobs. Others intentionally misclassify workers in order to underpay them - by, for example, paying a skilled construction worker as a general laborer.

But also, the guest workers program, it's quite often misused, meaning people could come in as part of a guest workers program and after two weeks in the fields, they'd run off to do every other kind of job that isn't covered by a guest workers program.

I'm for anything that lets people come here to work legally. There are more protections for workers who are here legally than for those who are not. It's also safer for the workers and employers have a more consistent pool of workers.

Everything is produced by the workers, and the minute they try to get something by their unions they meet all the opposition that can be mustered by those who now get what they produce.

There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way.

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.

Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s.