Frances O'Grady Quotes

The fear of being laid off next payday did as much damage as real unemployment.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.

When people have lost their jobs or are afraid of losing their jobs in the future, they lash out. They want others to know about their fears, their pain.

Democrats have always historically referred to our families as working families, and I have sort of changed that moniker. I think what we have is a nation of worried families - families that are concerned about job security, families who thought their pensions were secure and now have questions.

The idea that you won't have a job is a real fear that people go through, so when people talk about jobs and say, 'I'm gonna create jobs!' or, 'There's gonna be a loss of jobs,' those are just words. But the reality of someone actually losing their job - I mean, it's their entire life for most people in this country.

There isn't a single business where anybody feels secure.

We must start with the reality that corporations cannot guarantee anyone a lifetime job any more than corporations have a guarantee of immortality.

The economic tsunami has hit all airline employees. With the 2001 terror attacks, airline bankruptcies, pension terminations, loss of pay, changes in work rules - we're all working harder and longer than we used to.

Americans are terrified because so many of them have been laid off in recent years and months and they fear that they may be next. Even if they have not been laid off or have not known anyone laid off, they definitely know someone who has lost his home.

I always know I'm going to lose my job. It's either going to be canceled next week or next year or nine years from now, but I always know my job is going to go.

You never can take for granted that you have a job.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.

When for so long you can't get a job for reasons that seem specious, you you finally do have it, you are constantly afraid of losing it.

American capitalism today offers us no assurances that our efforts will be rewarded by security, stability or enough income to let us live well or at least well enough… Contemporary capitalism turns all workers—laborers and managers alike—into economic junk. The days if a long career with one employer, once a key part of the American dream, are long gone for most workers.

People are really worried about their jobs. That's what everybody talks to me about today.

To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.

I'm constantly paranoid that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life... and have to go back folding shirts at the Gap, which you know... you gotta do what you gotta do.

Every actor fears unemployment - even me.

None of us can promise any of you that what you now do for a living is absolutely safe from now on.

The minute your membership looses a job that can be identified, economic theory goes out the window. You're dealing with frightened human beings.

I am telling you, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs.

it seems to me absolutely scandalous to try to set wage levels which wipe out jobs. I mean these are people who are not on the dole. They want to work and if you price them out of the market, its gonna be a lot worse for them and for the economy.

We will not adopt the fantastic hypocrisy of modern conservatism which preaches the values of families and communities, while conducting a direct assault on them through reduced wages and conditions and job security.

This is a political season where politicians will do almost anything to prey on the public’s fear of job loses.

Job loss is coming like a tsunami.