Cesar Chavez Quotes

The strongest form of fight against the capitalist class is the strike. Strikes are necessary, ever again, against the capitalists’ tendency to increase their profits by lowering wages and increase the hours or the intensity of work.

I am heartedly in favor of these strikers, but they do not appreciate the best of what our society has produced.

Many blue-collar families struggling to pay rent would be happy to skip paying optional union dues.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

Most arguments for instituting or raising a minimum wage are based on fairness and redistribution. Even if workers are getting a competitive wage, many of us are deeply disturbed that some hard-working families still have very little.

Alas few socialists are either benevolent enough to work hard at these occupations out of benevolence or self-interested enough to work hard at them for money.

Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts, which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied.

At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.

The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.

We have to raise the minimum wage.

This administration and the leadership in Congress appear to be intent on valuing wealth over work, thereby placing working families at a distinct disadvantage.

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

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.

The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system.

There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.

The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.

The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.

Not a penny off the pay. Not a minute on the day.

No strike has ever been lost.

Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage earner.

Labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.