Gwen Moore Quotes

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.

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

I'm pro Union.

Your strike will not win. You cannot be allowed to succeed.

We could see the Teamsters coming in from New Jersey, the AFL-CIO from Chicago. You could see all of the people being bused in.

The unions may continue to decline, but if they do, it'll be their fault.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

Trade unionism is not a discovery or a formula. It grew and evolved slowly out of the needs of human experience.

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.

The strike is the weapon of the industrial jungle.

The number of men out on strike exceeds that of any other industrial contest in the history of our country.

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

Today we often take for granted the fact that supporters of The Militant can stand in front of a mine portal and distribute the paper. But this was a right that we along with other miners had to fight for against the coal companies and some conservative-minded workers.

The right to organize is a fundamental right for American workers.

Many people have mixed views about unions, but unions used to give people some measure of control at work. They gave them a social life and political representation in Washington, which doesn't really exist anymore.

I am a huge believer in organized labor. Period. Full stop.

I have no use for those- regardless of their political party- who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass.

A basic assumption shapes most Americans’ mindset about labor: the belief that the death of unions isn’t my problem because I’m not in a union. That assumption is wrong. Even if you aren’t a member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.

I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.

At the time there was a hospital strike in New York and the Catholic hospitals were part of a general consortium, and the head of the consortium had decided that they were finally going to replace some of the striking workers. And I hear [John] O'Connor yelling, 'Over my dead body will you replace any of those workers! They have a right to strike.' So I figured, 'This is interesting.'

When [Steven Lerner] says that unions and so forth are "dead," he's talking about clout. He's talking about power. But "community organizations," the ACORN types, these are the groups that can successfully organize a strike - a strike meaning people just stop paying back on their loans.

In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world.

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 labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.