Richard Trumka Quotes
I’ll stop demonizing business when business stops putting their profits before the country and starts putting their workers before their greed.
Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, Quoted on PBS Evening News, October 27, 2009
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time many workers lived in housing owned by their employer. When the Pullman company had a labor dispute, they not only locked the workers out of their jobs but evicted them from their meager housing.
He had squads of thugs that he would “rent” out to other gangsters for their enforcement activities and to unions to protect themselves from goons and intimidate non union workers. However, he would not let his men work as goons and strike busters or for companies—despite huge pay offers—to keep their workers in line, a common practice at the time.
In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruled that Corporations were people in the sense that the corporations had the right of freedom of speech in general and all political speech in particular and spending money on campaigns was a form of speech. Many thought that the consequences would be terrible for the American political system and urged legislation and/or a Constitutional Amendment. They particularly attacked the notion that a corporation was a person as this quotation illustrates.
The two politicians were amazed as they learned more and more about some of industrial leaders of the country. This is the language they used in private communications.
Richard Louis Trumka is an organized labor leader in the United States. He was elected president of the AFL-CIO on September 16, 2009, at the federation's convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He served as the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009, and prior to that was President of the United Mine Workers from 1982 to 1995. Trumka was named one of Esquire Magazine's Americans of the Year in 2011.
