Lisa Joy Quotes

Without the Chinese, it would have been impossible to complete the Western portion of this great National Highway. [The Transcontinental Railroad]

I think that perhaps if I looked through the sweatshops myself, we might be in a condition to put things on a new basis, just as … in the police department after you and I began our midnight tours.

I can identify with steelworkers. I can identify with workers that have had a difficult time.

No matter what fine speeches are delivered to inspire the workers to revolutionary deeds, revolutionary action does not spring from such words, but from the keen and hard necessity that leaves no other choice whatsoever.

“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.

The fight for the liberation of the working class from its present position, which is beneath a free people, is not a fight for new class privileges and prerogatives but for equal rights and equal obligations for all and for the abolition of class rule

The most fervid demand, however, of all the workers on strike was for a shorter day … 10½ hours instead or 13 hours as formerly, or even 14 and 16 reckoning the time of cleaning machinery.

It was repugnant to my convictions and my experience so far to encroach upon the independence of the worker, in his professional life and his rights as the head of a family, as to forbid him by law to exploit his own working capacities, and those of his family, according to his own judgment. I do not believe that the workingman is in himself grateful because he is forbidden to earn money on certain days, and during certain hours, as he may choose.

The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America … In the Lancashire cotton mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood), children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural labourers were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first effect of machinery in England.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

If there is to be peace in our industrial life, let the employer recognize his obligation to his employees

This is far too heavy a draft upon the energies of the workmen of any industry …. The working forces [should] have time for leisure … and family life.

A rise of prices necessarily results in a diminution of the enjoyments of the laboring class until they can force the employers, through a long process of agitation, to make an increase in their wages.

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

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

The dearest interests of the Southern states are involved in the adoption of measures for the support and encouragement of free laboring whites.

My heart lies with the workers.

It is in another world. In the midst of so much wealth there seems to nothing but chimneys and flaring furnaces with wretched cottages around them. Add to this a thick and black atmosphere and you have but a first impression of the life a third of my subjects are forced to live.

We must remember that the real problem is not how to produce some improvement in the condition of the working man— for that has to a certain extent been attained already— but how to secure his complete material independence.

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters [employers] and their workmen, its counselors [members of the legislature] are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

Labor: a man coins himself into his labor,—turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all, and constitutions and governments exist for that,—to protect and insure it to the laborer.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age -- other people's money -- these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in..

The internal market should be designed to benefit each and every citizen of the Community. It is therefore necessary to improve workers' living and working conditions, and to provide better protection for their health and safety at work ...

Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.

The Nordic governments have adopted a market-friendly approach to regulation. Although they maintain regulations to protect workers, consumers and the environment, they balance those protections with a system that encourages entrepreneurship and flexibility by making it easy to start or close a business, to hire or fire employees, and to adjust work hours.