Richard Oastler Quotes

The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester

The mill-owners obtained their wealth by overworking and by defrauding the factory children. They were praying people, but took care their work people should neither have time nor strength to pray. These hypocrites pretended it was necessary to keep these poor infant slaves at this excruciating labour just to preserve them from "bad company" and to prevent them learning "bad habits".

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

The priority of work over capital places an obligation in justice upon employers to consider the welfare of the workers before the increase of profits.

Very often the children are awakened by the parents at four in the morning. They are pulled out of bed when almost asleep. The younger children are carried on the backs of the older children asleep to the mill, and they see no more of their parents till they go home at night, and are sent to bed.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

It Is Not Linen You're Wearing Out But Human Creatures' Lives.

The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.

Among the most oppressive measures, and the ones most deeply harming society, is the compelling of subjects to perform forced work unjustly.

Employers will work you longer for less money and under questionable safety conditions because it is their duty to prioritize the bottom line. As individuals, we cannot complain. That's why we need a union to speak for us, certainly when our safety, our health, and our very lives are at stake!

To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of the machines of flesh and blood

And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germanys of Jesuitism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory. work began at five o'clock in the morning and ended at eight o’clock in the evening, summer and winter. It was a sight to watch them arrive each morning into the city and depart each evening. Among them were a multitude of women, pale, often walking bare-footed through the mud, and who for lack of umbrellas when the rain or snow fell, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their heads. There was a still larger number of young children, equally dirty, equally pale, covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil which drops on them while they work. They were better protected from the rain because their clothes shed water; but unlike the women just mentioned, they did not carry their day’s provisions in a basket, but they carried in their hands or hid under their clothing as best they might, the morsel of bread which must serve them as food until time for them to return home. Thus to the strain of an insufferably long day – at least fifteen hours – is added for these wretches the fatigue of the painful daily journeys. Consequently they reach home overwhelmed by the need of sleep, and next day they rise before they are completely rested in order to reach the factory by the opening time.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

There are practices which most people believe should be ended. They include … the shifting of actual production form one locality or region to another in pursuit of the cheapest wage scale.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

I have an idea for sweatshops: air conditioning! That's simple. 14 year old boys working twelve hour days? "Yeah, but they're comfortable!"

Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.

In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs.

Free trade should not mean free labor.

Coal mining is an industry rife with mismanagement, corruption, greed and an almost blatant disregard for the safety, health and quality of life of its work force. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known it.

I believe there's been a slippery slope of new companies that have formed in the name of on-demand services... that maybe aren't having as much of a focus as they should on the worker.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much...) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers.