Frederick Elwin Smith Birkenhead Quotes

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

Labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

… the struggle of men to outvie one another in production is beneficial to the community; their struggle over the division of the joint produce is not. The stronger side will dictate its own terms; and as a matter of fact, in the early days of competition, the capitalists used all their power to oppress the laborers, and drove down wages to starvation point. This kind of competition has to be checked; there is no historical instance of its having lasted long without being modified either by combination or legislation, or both. In England both remedies are in operation, the former through Trades Unions, the latter through factory legislation.

Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

I was anxious to save the great coal operators and all of the class of big propertied men, of which they were members, from the dreadful punishment which their own folly would have brought on them if I had not acted.

You cannot appeal from the classes to the masses. What the employer thinks, his workmen think. Of course I do not include questions specially relating to labour, in which there may be a direct conflict of interest.

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters [employers] and their workmen, its counselors [members of the legislature] are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

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.

I make films about working class people.

We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?

For reforms ameliorate the situation of the working class, they lighten the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to crush capitalism and to emancipate the workers from their tyranny.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class-theory.

This trial is a fight between capital and labor, of which this is but a manifestation up here in the woods.

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.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.