Robert Strauss Quotes

There is too much employer-employee relationship in America. I wish the musicians would feel that many decisions have to do with them and not delegate everything to management or to the board or to the committee. This is why you get a sense of pride in some of the European orchestras: because they are part of the decision-making.

On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else. A way toward that goal could be found by associating labor with the ownership of capital joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, so-called shareholding by labor, etc.

We want people to have a stake in the British economy so I am in favour of actually encouraging people to have small shareholdings and feel they've got a stake in our economic future.

Meanwhile, what about the workers in those state monopolies that are being put up for sale? I am reminded of a technique for employee ownership that has worked well for many U.S. companies. It goes by various names, but the best known is "Employee Stock Ownership Program," or ESOP.

What is a fair way to structure our economy? To handle those who did not come to America legally? To distribute scarce public resources and benefits?

America should be about owning a piece of the rock, about letting every worker have equity and share in the returns to capital.

Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM and not the boss which must be changed?.

The paramount problem... is how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country's industries. Open to the wage-earner of the country the road to proprietorship... not as a gratuity, but as their proper allotment out of the combined forces that have made the enterprise successful.

I am fascinated to hear of the impact that ESOPs have had on work-force morale in corporations of all sizes such as Sears Roebuck, Potomac Electric Power, Lowe's Companies and the Dow Chemical Company.

I want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top.

In all human affairs, the wisest course is to be passionate about the role of reason and reasonable about the role of passion.

The industrial world would be a more peaceful place if workers were called in as collaborators in the process of establishing standards and defining shop practices, matters which surely affect their interests and well-being fully as much as they affect those of employers and consumers.

The right to work is a slogan which should be accepted by every democracy.

Shares are not mere pieces of paper. They represent part ownership of a business. So, when contemplating an investment, think like a prospective owner.

The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.

A capitalist is someone who derives a substantial share of his income from his equity in producing companies. On this scale the figures are discouraging. Approximately ninety percent of the capital of this country is owned by five or less percent of the American people.

Government has the responsibility to provide the climate in which Americans, all Americans, have an opportunity for good jobs; and not only for good jobs, but an opportunity if they have the ability and the desire, to be owners and managers, to have a piece of the action, because if they have a piece of the action, then they believe in the system rather than fighting against it.

Increased interest and participation by labor in the affairs of government should make for economic and political stability in the future. Labor has a constitutional and statutory right to participate.

Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation's wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?

Time is on your side when you own shares of superior companies.

Many of the deficiencies of our economic system could be alleviated if ways were found to broaden the ownership of the means of production... This has happened in some companies through ESOPs. Successful approaches of this sort would pay dividends in terms of employee commitment and morale. And they would not deprive anyone of his present holdings since they are based on future growth.

Emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, i.e., from organizations of production in which the conditions of work are determined by a master class who own the means of production, and in which the fruits of work are alienated from workers to the benefit of masters.

When the mass of men are dispossessed - own nothing - they become wholly dependent upon the owners; and when those owners are in active competition to lower the cost of production the mass of men whom they exploit not only lack the power to order their own lives, but suffer from want and insecurity as well.

Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.