*
In
less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor
movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement!
The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay
rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there
any reason to believe we are done?
-- Holly
Near |  |
The
essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the
products of human labor.
-- George Orwell
Strike not for a few
cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but
strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less.
-- Lucy
Parsons | 
|
The
present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the unbridled
greed of competitors... so that a very few and exceedingly rich men have laid
a yoke of almost slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.
--
Pope Leo XIII
The
important role of union organizations must be admitted: their object is the representation
of the various categories of workers, their lawful collaboration in the economic
advance of society, and the development of the sense of their responsibility for
the realization of the common good.
-- Pope Paul VI
| 
|
*
"Out
of our first century of national life we evolved the ethical principle that it
was not right or just that an honest and industrious man should live and die in
misery. He was entitled to some degree of sympathy and security. Our conscience
declared against the honest workman's becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us
that he very often did."
-- Frances
Perkins "Our
idea of what constitutes social good has advanced with the procession of the ages,
from those desperate times when just to keep body and soul together was an achievement,
to the great present when "good" includes an agreeable, stable civilization accessible
to all, the opportunity of each to develop his particular genius and the privilege
of mutual usefulness."
-- Frances
Perkins |
| 
|
*
“Kids
don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little
sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast.
Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country;
we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management.
They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people,
by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That’s why I sing these songs. That’s
why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit!”
-- Utah
Phillips |
*
The
labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people
against the power of incorporated wealth.
-- Wendell
Phillips Organize,
and stand together. Claim something together, and at once; let the nation hear
a united demand from the laboring voice, and then, when you have got that, go
on after another; but get something.
-- Wendell
Phillips | 
|
The
right to a job without a right to a living wage is just as weak as the right to
a living wage without a job. Both rights must remain intact and linked together.
-- William P. Quigley
*
It's
incredible to see labor unions and environmentalists getting together to stop
the corporate mentality that destroys both jobs and the environment.
-- Bonnie
Raitt | 
|
| 
|
*
The
essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor movement has been the haven
for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.
-- A. Philip Randolph "Nothing
counts but pressure, pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure through
broad organized aggressive mass action."
--
A. Philip Randolph |
|
*
As
long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions of dollars are
being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being abused and
used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction.
~ Ocean
Robbins |  |
As
long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions of dollars are
being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being abused and
used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction. As long
as war and violence are in our hearts and our streets as well as in our nations,
as long as corporate greed and unsustainable consumption are at the forefront
of our economies, no child will be born into a truly safe, peaceful or loving
world.
~ Ocean
Robbins
"'If
democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these
rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom,
for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence,
choice of what work to pursue - control of our lives, in short. And then we wake
up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer
insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what
capitalism is - a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business
leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our
lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.... 'So. We must
challenge. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple justice
is a value, then they are values everywhere, including in the workplace where
we spend so much of our lives'...."
-- Kim Stanley Robinson
*
You
in the unions do not yet represent all of labor. But I hope some day you will,
because I believe that it is through strength, through the fact that people who
know what people need are working to make this country a better place for all
people, that we will help the world to accept our leadership and understand that,
under our form of government and through our way of life, we have something to
offer them…
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt | 
|
I have
always felt that it was important that everyone who was a worker join a labor
organization.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt
I
believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions,
so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people
who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but others know practically
nothing about.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt
The
labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt
| 
|
*
No
business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers
has any right to continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a
bare subsistence level --I mean the wages of decent living.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt |
It
is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic nation that is have free
and independent labor unions.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
It
is to the real advantage of every producer, every manufacturer and every merchant
to cooperate in the improvement of working conditions, because the best customer
of American industry is the well-paid worker.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
| *
"The
internal and external ethics of an organization must be the same; you cannot talk
about minimum wages for poor people and not pay minimum wages to your own workers."
-- Aruna
Roy | 
|
"We
call people who work with mud and earth, and sand and stone, unskilled labor in
India. I cannot in this lifetime wield the implements that they use either to
dig the earth or to shovel the earth. I can't carry the loads. That's extremely
specialized. But they are called unskilled, and I am called skilled because I
can write with the pen. I cannot accept this. I find it extremely non-egalitarian
to say they are unskilled and I am skilled. It's only a way of looking at it.
Knowledge is also like that."
-- Aruna Roy
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