John T. Flynn Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Regardless of the degree of class consciousness of their members, the trade unions are, by their very nature, driven on to the revolutionary goal.

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

It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

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

Labor is marching toward the goal of industrial democracy and contributing constructively toward a more rational arrangement of our domestic economy.

It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it.

Unquestionably unions and their leaders are not always wise and fair any more than any other human beings.

Unquestionably unions and their leaders are not always wise and fair any more than any other human beings. There are only two ways to bring about protection of the workers, however, legislation and unionization. So far the majority of the people in this country seem to favor unions as a more democratic and elastic method, though certain things must be dealt with by legislation.

Do not let [“Big”] Bill Hayward and the Industrial Workers of the World terrorize President, Congress, Judge and Juries.

Instead of focusing on attacking unions and the labor movement, we need to find ways to strengthen and empower workers so we can put more money in the pockets of middle class families.

Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and unaccountable.

I will stand with unions wholeheartedly, and that's the problem - the Democratic Party wants to say that, but their actions do not mirror that.

Political activity by unions is not wrong. It's their First Amendment right.

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.

Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

The men in the steel industry who sacrificed their all were nor merely aiding their fellows at home but were adding strength to the cause of their comrades in all industry.

Public unions are big money.

I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.