Dolores Huerta Quotes

There is no law for farm labor organizing, save the law of the jungle.

I am happy to see that, increasingly, people care about farm workers. There is tremendous interest in where and how our food is grown.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

The people who harvest America's food must be treated with respect and earn a living wage.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

It is impossible to place labor and capital in harmonious or friendly relations, except by the means of slavery

Farm workers are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves

Who is looking out for the working class? The answer is, Nobody!

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.

The workers who harvest our food have been systematically denied the basic rights that are granted to all other American workers. They can be fired for trying to form a union or for attempting to improve their working conditions. They are not eligible for overtime pay, disability, or even unemployment insurance.

I'd have to pick cotton for a year to make what I'd make in a week in L.A.

People associate farmworkers with illegal immigrants, and that's really not the case.

Every time we sit at a table at night or in the morning to enjoy the fruits and grain and vegetables from our good earth, remember that they come from the work of men and women and children who have been exploited for generations.

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

I protest against the fitness and truth of the usually received definitions and applications of "slave labor" and "free labor"--and, in contradiction thereto, maintain that, in proportion to the respective populations, there are many more slaves in England, and in very much more suffering and painful conditions, than in all the negro slaveholding States of this Confederation.

Women constitute a cheap labor force and above all a submissive one that only in the rarest of cases dares to kick against the thorns of capitalist exploitation, the capitalists multiply the possibilities of women’s work in industry. As a result of all this, the proletarian woman has achieved her independence. But verily, the price was very high and for the moment they have gained very little.

We believe this is a most ill-judged and suicidal act ... from which we should emerge only through blood and fire or chains and slavery more dire than any we have yet known. There are men earning 15/-, 20/-, 25/- and 30/- a week. I ask, will those men be likely, in a body, to keep the Sacred Holiday? I say not; and, if not, who will be sacrificed? The answer is easy. The most determined, resolute and oppressed.

Pullman, who has grown so rich from the toil of his workingmen, that he can riot in luxury, while he heartlessly turns these very workmen out of their tenements into the streets and leave to the tender mercies of corporate greed.

In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working classes which results from this is the cause of misery and of servitude in all its forms.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated ...

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.