Tawni O'Dell Quotes

I will use all my influence in trying to remove from our factory system the cruelties which are practiced in our mills.

I oppose increased black-lung benefits for miners, because ‘they chose to be miners.

In manufacturing, too much work is beyond repetitive - it is inhumane. The people doing this work aren't doing it because they want to - they are doing it because they have families to feed and clothe.

A coal mine greets you with only one sentiment, then hammers it: 'This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people'.

In one hotel, the maid who built the fire fainted in our room. Exhaustion was the cause. We talked with her later and learned that she worked 17 hours a day and makes 95 marks a month - about 50 cents.

The cutthroat part of it is that professional wrestling has no union. There are a number of people that are taken advantage of on a daily basis.

Police were frequently involved in arbitrary arrests and detentions, often motivated by attempts to collect bribes. Some of these problems could be attributed to the very poor working conditions of the police, including low rates of pay

Violation of workers' rights persists, but workers can't turn to the authorities because it is the authorities themselves who commit the violations.

Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

Disproportionate corporate power over governments is giving license to the greed that denies workers even minimum living wages. It is also seemingly a license to allow the sheer brutality of treatment of working people at the base of the supply chains.

Serious concerns about worker safety and fair treatment have been reported at Amazon warehouses. Workers have fallen ill from extreme heat, had to urinate in bottles because they don't have enough time to use facilities, and been unfairly terminated.

The miseries suffered by our people come more from the shameless exploitation of our countries.

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.

We have to put an end to the culture of selfishness and corruption that allows greedy Wall Street banks and executives to rip off working people without any consequences.

The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time - 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn't have toilets in the fields; they didn't have cold drinking water. They didn't have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.

The difference between the Chinese workers and foreign workers lies in the fact that the latter are oppressed only by their own capitalists and not by those of other countries.

As a businessman, Trump preyed on the hopes and anxieties of struggling middle-class families. He cheated and scammed employees and customers alike. He left behind a trail of bankrupted companies. Past is prologue, and Trump has continued to pursue his own aggrandizement ruthlessly and relentlessly as a candidate and as president-elect.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

It's an awful thing to be aware of your own corruption. I think a lot of people are bound by the particular economic system we work in to serve companies and masters who aren't really telling people what they're doing.

We farm workers are closest to food production. We were the first to recognize the serious health hazards of agriculture pesticides to both consumers and ourselves.

California is one of the strongest states with one of the solidest economies but, at the same time, ignores the reality of its farm workers.

Employers will work you longer for less money and under questionable safety conditions because it is their duty to prioritize the bottom line. As individuals, we cannot complain. That's why we need a union to speak for us, certainly when our safety, our health, and our very lives are at stake!

Many Americans are unaware that discarded electronics often contain lead, mercury, and other toxins and end up being salvaged under inhumane conditions in the developing world.