Molly Ivins Quotes

What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

The union in many cases is reduced to the level of a facilitator, an agent or a "party" in negotiations. As such, how can it be seen by its members to be an organized and dedicated instrument relentlessly pursuing their aspirations and resolutely protecting their wages, conditions and standards?

Instead of focusing on attacking unions and the labor movement, we need to find ways to strengthen and empower workers so we can put more money in the pockets of middle class families.

When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that.

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

Well, I'm not trying to get rid of the unions, but I am saying that they appear to be an antiquated concept in today's economy.

By the mid-1950s, more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie.

Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.

Unions are about the collective leverage, the power of numbers versus the power of capital.

Trade unions are a force for good - a force for a more equal society.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

If you can peel off a few unions, you can make the Democratic Party irrelevant.

When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate interests; when the farmers were demanding legislation which would give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a common advance, it was natural that the workers should seek and obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right to organize themselves for collective bargaining.

Trade unionism is not a discovery or a formula. It grew and evolved slowly out of the needs of human experience.

The trade union, which originated under the European system, destroys liberty.

The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

It is essential that there be organization of labor…. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

We are the only industrial democracy that does not have one political party that is labor based.

My heart lies with the workers.

Modern trade unions understood that deciphering a balance sheet was more important than decoding Das Kapital.

We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.

We must defend the rights of working people to bargain collectively for fair wages and safe working conditions.