Steve Jurvetson Quotes

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

Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

I never had a childhood. I started working when I was 7 years old. I got $1 a day getting water for the workers at the sugar cane plant.

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.

People don't really believe that their computer or sneakers are made by small hands, a child's hands, or a person who is living such a miserable life. They somehow think that, no, that person has a tough life, but it's an OK life.

In India, innocent and poor children are victims of child labor.

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.

Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net.

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

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?

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.

Every hour I spent on manual work, every hour I was humiliated in England or degraded has helped me because that's the same way other people feel in the townships here. People are still walking long distances and are working long hours.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

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

No family should have to depend on the labor of its children to put food on the table and no person should be forced to work in captivity.

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.

The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children.

People have nothing to lose. Government has stripped them of their dignity and their respect.

Increase of slaves in this colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient

Will the American People Never Cease to Oppress and Torture the Helpless poor?

It is in another world. In the midst of so much wealth there seems to nothing but chimneys and flaring furnaces with wretched cottages around them. Add to this a thick and black atmosphere and you have but a first impression of the life a third of my subjects are forced to live.

The miserable living conditions, the long [work] hours, the universal insecurity, tended to tear down the personality, cheapen the man.

In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.

The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed. No one—neither tenants nor their landlords—had any problem making children and women work in the fields.

At about an age when most children start full time schooling, hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries start a lifetime of drudgery in factories and fields, working 12-16 hours daily.