Neil F. Hartigan Quotes

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.

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

In manufacturing, too much work is beyond repetitive - it is inhumane. The people doing this work aren't doing it because they want to - they are doing it because they have families to feed and clothe.

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

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?

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.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

The capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers.

In the 'Nike Economy,' there are no standards, no borders and no rules. Clearly, the global economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

We were no experts in the field of labor organization, but we had something in common with our fellow workers -- we were all poor -- we were all overworked -- we were all victims of the 84 hour week. In fact, we were all so low down on the economic and social ladder that we had nowhere to go but up

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

…In certain parts of Latin America, the seizure of the vast majority of the wealth by an oligarchy of owners bereft of social consciousness, the practical absence or the shortcomings of a rule of law, military dictators making a mockery of elementary human rights, the corruption of certain powerful officials, the savage practices of some foreign capital interests constitute factors which nourish a passion for revolt among those who thus consider themselves the powerless victims of a new colonialism in the technological, financial, monetary, or economic order.

Disenfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

I do not know the needs of a god or of another world.... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one.

All down history, nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining one-tenth, been paid with the husks, and bidden to thank God they had the husks.

Most of the misery and poverty in the world is due to bad government.

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

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?

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".

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.