Norris H. Cotton Quotes

There is no other bargaining but collective bargaining.

I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.

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

The denial by employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest, which have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce.

No matter what the motive of the employer, any strike aimed at him is in physical fact a strike against ourselves and our country. No matter if he claims or seems to be in non-essential production, no strike is proper, for strikes are infectious and damaging to morale.

I will use the power of the government of the United States within my control to prevent the labor unions ... from destroying the open shop.

The strike is the weapon of the industrial jungle.

Rather than negotiate with the teachers’ unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

I had rather submit our industrial controversies to the conference table in advance than to a settlement table after conflict and suffering.

The attitude of refusal to participate in collective bargaining with representatives of the employees' own choosing is the negation of this bridge to better relationship.

There is no way whereby our labor movement may be assured sustained progress in determining its policies and its plans other than sincere democratic deliberation until a unanimous decision is reached. This may seem a cumbrous, slow method to the impatient, but the impatient are more concerned for immediate triumph than for the education of constructive development.

No better strike leader than John N. Mitchell has ever emerged in any time of industrial strife.

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

We don't have unions in South Carolina because we don't need unions in South Carolina.

Public unions are big money.

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.

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

I've always had a very positive relationship with the municipal labor unions - a respectful relationship.

I came from a family where joining a union was the expected thing to do. I've always believed that the relationship between an employer and an individual worker is fundamentally unequal.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.

When the unions were fighting me 45 years ago, they could never beat me.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.