Frank O'Hara Quotes

I worked three summers putting in sewer pipe and guardrail on the road in Ohio.

OSHA was created to regulate jobs that cause injury or illness to workers. Increasingly, though, OSHA sees its purpose as improving the general welfare of working Americans, whether work itself is hazardous or not.

The government passed more laws to protect women from dirty jokes than to protect men from death by faulty rafters at a construction site.

Latinos are disproportionately more likely to be injured on the job than other ethnic groups.

I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners, and that's really hard work.

I'm a farm boy. If we need five people to haul in hay, we don't take one and just work them to death.

I like dirty boys. Mechanics, construction workers, artists who get paint and clay everywhere. They gotta have rough hands.

I like doing things where I can get dirty, work with my hands, and use power tools. Last weekend, I did some grouting.

I used to be a hot-tar roofer. Yeah, I remember that... day.

But I was also doing odd jobs around Portland, like spreading gravel and transplanting bamboo trees.

Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

Whether we, as individuals, are motivated by simple humanity or by simple economics, we can no longer permit profits to be dependent upon an unsafe or unhealthy work site.

It is a reproach to our civilization that any class of American workmen, should in the pursuit of a necessary and useful vocation, be subjected to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.

The memory of the 146 people who lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire stands as a reminder that legal protections and workplace safety standards were won through a long struggle for social justice and at great human cost.

I'd rather not be a roofer.

So much of my background is about making: physically doing it myself.

I worked construction clean-up. I was driving a pickup truck at the age of 14 on a construction site. I loved building and being part of the process. You got to see your work.

I was in the cement end of the construction business, as a laborer. I was pouring concrete, and stripping forms off of set concrete, and pulling nails, and stacking plywood, and doing that kind of thing. I was in peak condition in those days.

People I grew up with, my family, work in the oil fields. Everyone works a labor job - construction, concrete. All we know is work. It's a physical culture.

I did a lot of blue collar work. I also worked as a temp. I did, you know, light construction and cleaning. I did clerical temping. I also fix cars and motorcycles and electronics.

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!

I thought I would be laying hardwood floors in Colorado - a construction worker. Middle class or working class, that's where I was! I just fought because I loved it. It was so fun! Being able to go in there and outthink your opponents.

I've framed houses, worked on an asphalt crew, I was a cop, a lifeguard.

When you wrestle for 15 years, you don't want to go back to driving that forklift.

Building stuff. Lifting blocks. That's how I got stronger. I never lifted weights. I just did masonry work with my pops.