Howard Fineman Quotes

If you can peel off a few unions, you can make the Democratic Party irrelevant.

After contract negotiations and organizing, playing an active role in the political process is one of a union's most important functions. Gains won at the bargaining table or through sacrifice on the picketline can be wiped out by politicians on the state or federal level.

We back Solidarity [the Polish trade union], and bust our unions.

The weapon of political action. That is going to be the main fighting weapon of all labor, international as well as national, if we are going to do those things that we are in business to do as a labor union

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

The decline of the trade union is to some extent inevitable and irreversible.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.

When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

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.

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

I have been very interested in labor movement. If I could have wished another life, I would have loved to be a pioneer woman in the beginning of labor movement.

Unions are about the collective leverage, the power of numbers versus the power of capital.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

Labor has no quarrel with capital, as such. It is merely the possessors of capital who refuse to accord to labor the recognition, the right, the justice which is the laborers' due, with whom we contend.

The unions used to sell security. They can’t deliver any more.

Republicans are always much more supportive of unions in Poland than they are of unions in the United States.

The labor question is the same the world over, and laborers of the world should clasp hands for their common wealth.

The strongest form of fight against the capitalist class is the strike. Strikes are necessary, ever again, against the capitalists’ tendency to increase their profits by lowering wages and increase the hours or the intensity of work.

The task is before us. We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized. We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized by the masters….the labor unions of America are being broken up because there is not sufficient unified understanding, because there is not sufficient leadership to save them.

Labor Unions are revolutionary and anarchistic and a menace to the entire social and industrial system of the United States.

There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. That is his right. It is his legal right, no matter how morally wrong he may be.

Labor organizations had been the victims of so much political trickery that we felt that the only way to keep this new organization free from taint was to exclude all political partisan action.

The history of all countries shows that, by its own efforts, the working class can develop only a trade-union consciousness—that is, the realization of the need of getting together in unions in order to fight employers and to demand from the government the passing of laws necessary for the workers.

The future of Labor is the future of America.