Leila Janah Quotes

My parents were both union members, and I grew up hearing how important it was to empower workers and have fair labor practices.

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.

The Republican Party is bringing out here onto the floor of Congress an all-out assault on the protection of the rights of people who work in the fields of our country, in the factories of our country, in the offices of our country.

Only with the tools of production in their own hands could the workers ever hope to control their own lives and receive the fruits of their labor.

I came from a family where joining a union was the expected thing to do. I've always believed that the relationship between an employer and an individual worker is fundamentally unequal.

The employer class is less indispensable in the modern organization of industries because the laboring men themselves possess sufficient intelligence to organize into co-operative relation and enjoy the entire benefits of their own labor.

Out of labor's struggle in Arizona came better conditions for the workers, who must everywhere, at all times, under advantage and disadvantage work out their own salvation.

I have always been fully persuaded that, through co-operation, labor could become its own employer.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.

I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.

I will never apologize for standing up for my fellow Teamsters and all American workers.

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.

The labor question is the same the world over, and laborers of the world should clasp hands for their common wealth.

To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.

What labor is demanding all over the world today is not a few material things like more dollars and fewer hours of work, but the right to a voice in the conduct of industry.

I will only stop defending the rights of workers when I die.

No strike is a loss or failure to the workers, even if the point sought is not gained for the time being. If naught else they teach the capitalists that they are expensive luxuries.

Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

When labor is strong, America is strong.