Eddie Marsan Quotes

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.

My heart lies with the workers.

Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work.

There is nothing that says unions have a God-given right to be there. We have to work at it and make ourselves relevant to every section of the workforce.

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.

You look at right-to-work states: a lot of car companies are relocating down to the South so they don't have to deal with the unions or the legacy cost or any of those things, and that's what manufacturing's done.

Unions do have a proper role in negotiating for employees and advising employees, but they have to engage with the employer.

The biggest labor problem is tomorrow.

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.

If you don't have the good fortune to work a lot then you take any job you get offered, whether it's a good job, fun job, a bad job, horrible job, whatever, you just take what you need to take. But I'm lucky in that - at the moment anyway and hopefully forever, but who knows - I get the chance to pick jobs for the kick of it and the fun.

Private sector labors unions continue to suffer losses in their membership while public sector and service unions grow.

It's hard to make a living in this business. Unions aren't as strong as they used to be. For a journeyman actor - someone who doesn't have a famous name but has consistent work in theater or film or TV - it has become harder to get through, harder to raise a family.

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.

The progress of society is mainly the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that, I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.

We talk about Hollywood being pro-labor, yet about 70% of our industry has been farmed out to Canada, meaning we are losing jobs like crazy. Where's organized labor asking how we can allow such a thing to happen?

I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.

Although everyone does benefit from lower-priced goods and services, people also care greatly about the chance to be productively employed and the quality of their work. Declining employment opportunities feel real and immediate; the rise in real incomes brought by lower prices does not.

In America, people know there are always 10 people better than them who are after their job. In France, they know that too - but no one is going to get their job till they go to their grave.

Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do.

Any reasonable economist will tell you that it's nearly impossible to isolate the impact of right-to-work laws on a state's job growth. A multitude of other factors intervene. However, one thing the numbers can show is that right-to-work laws have a negative effect on the wages of workers in that state.

One of the great things about unions is they're member driven and give us the great ability to both lead and follow at the same time.

I've never seen someone work for a salary.

Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.