Benjamin Fine Quotes

I am always on the side of labor when there is any compromise to be made.

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

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

The labor movement has lifted more people out of poverty than all the programs in the country.

The workers, before all else.

Before there were unions, there was no middle class.

Each reform, therefore, improving the economical and political situation of the workers proves to be an arm that increases the energy with which the proletarian struggle of classes is fought.

The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.

The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions.

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

Labor: a man coins himself into his labor,—turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all, and constitutions and governments exist for that,—to protect and insure it to the laborer.

Unions are the result of profit seekers. Unions are the way the average guy gets even with evil corporateers. The unions are godsends. The unions have a special status, because they represent the rising up of the average man against the evil corporateers and profiteers.

I have been very interested in labor movement. If I could have wished another life, I would have loved to be a pioneer woman in the beginning of labor movement.

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

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?

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

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

Labor has no quarrel with capital, as such. It is merely the possessors of capital who refuse to accord to labor the recognition, the right, the justice which is the laborers' due, with whom we contend.

What shall the workers do? Sit idly by and see the vast resources of nature and the human mind be utilized and monopolized for the benefit of the comparative few? No. The laborers must learn to think and act, and soon, too, that only by the power of organization, and common concert of action, can either their manhood be maintained, their rights to life (work to sustain it) be recognized, and liberty and rights secured.

The labor movement has failed to capture the support of the public at large.

The strongest form of fight against the capitalist class is the strike. Strikes are necessary, ever again, against the capitalists’ tendency to increase their profits by lowering wages and increase the hours or the intensity of work.

Unions may also legitimately resort to strikes where this is the only available means to the justice owed to workers

The history of all countries shows that, by its own efforts, the working class can develop only a trade-union consciousness—that is, the realization of the need of getting together in unions in order to fight employers and to demand from the government the passing of laws necessary for the workers.

Let him who will, be he economic tyrant or sordid mercenary, pit his strength against this mighty upsurge of human sentiment now being crystallized in the hearts of thirty million workers who clamor for the establishment of industrial democracy and for participation in its tangible fruits. He is a madman of a fool who believes that this river of human sentiment can be damned.

When labor is strong, America is strong.