Paul Krugman Quotes

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

Unions are about the collective leverage, the power of numbers versus the power of capital.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

It is essential that there be organization of labor…. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

We are the only industrial democracy that does not have one political party that is labor based.

Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and unaccountable.

Political activity by unions is not wrong. It's their First Amendment right.

Unions have been the best anti-poverty program that actually worked and did not cost the government a dime. But as unions grow smaller- not stronger- our ability to act as an economic mechanism to distribute the gains of our work and raise all workers' wages and benefits up is disappearing.

Anti-union propaganda has been considerably more successful here [ in the U.S.] than in Europe, even among working people who would benefit [from] unions.

People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement.

In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world.

So why am I facing a recall election? Simple: the big government union bosses from Washington want their money. They don't like the fact that I did something fundamentally pro-worker; something that's truly about freedom.

What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s.

But among them now were a large number of Communists in positions of great power within the new union movement, some of them actually moving close to the center of power. This was the crack in the wall through which they entered. Their power was to grow and prosper.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

By the mid-1950s, more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie.

Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.

Trade unions are a force for good - a force for a more equal society.

Any union that can't accept workers choosing their own representatives through universal franchise is finished.

It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.