John F. Kennedy Quotes

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

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

By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights the right to belong to a free trade union.

In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world.

We'll be competitive with organized labor, we're also competitive with regular, unorganized labor, working people who see their stakes and their future in the plans we're putting forward to move Massachusetts forward.

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.

If we're all together, we have money, and we start to organize, you're going to see the Teamsters Union start to bloom.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

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.

What my Republican colleagues often don't understand is that labor is a human-rights issue. I have to remind them Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement brought down the Communist bloc.

People have to be reminded that unions played a very historic role in our economy.

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

This conviction brought me, in the summer of 1978, to the Free Trade Unions - formed by a group of courageous and dedicated people who came out in the defense of the workers' rights and dignity.

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

Duty of the Catholic Worker to Join Organized Labor

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.

Labor is marching toward the goal of industrial democracy and contributing constructively toward a more rational arrangement of our domestic economy.

Power? Nine workers out of ten still unorganized, and union dues going to bribe middle class politicians. You call that power?

It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it.

Today we often take for granted the fact that supporters of The Militant can stand in front of a mine portal and distribute the paper. But this was a right that we along with other miners had to fight for against the coal companies and some conservative-minded workers.

Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and unaccountable.

I am a huge believer in organized labor. Period. Full stop.