Studs Terkel Quotes

Whether we, as individuals, are motivated by simple humanity or by simple economics, we can no longer permit profits to be dependent upon an unsafe or unhealthy work site.

This is a matter of humiliation to the nation that an employee who suffered an injury through no fault of his own would not be protected. In no other prominent industrial country in the world could such gross injustice occur.

Then you'd have found me pinned beneath a large metal pipe.

Every single Federal mine safety initiative has been written with the blood of miners.

[Industrialists] maim and slaughter workers by thousands.

There is nothing to stop him from making coal mines safe except his lack of desire to do so …. J. A. Krug permitted these men to die by his inaction.

In 1896 one out of every 11 steel workers would die on the job.

This is going to sound really crude, but I lost my fingers in a meat grinder.

I am fully on board with the Wellness Policy. Even after being suspended by it, I'm fully on board with it. I think it's really keeping people healthy in general.

My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward.

Union membership is not the sole guarantor of job security and a living wage, but nonunion factory workers do not enjoy the same protections as union workers. They're subject to exploitation, underpayment and lower standards of workplace safety - which is also often the case for manufacturing workers outside the United States.

Never wear your necktie while you're operating a lathe.

He's had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn't.

The way to get killed around machinery was to take things for granted.

Before we left town, Antonio pulled into a strip mall and went in to get subs and salads, leaving Clay and me half naked and bleeding in the car, and Cain unconscious in the trunk. No wonder I was anxious to get back to Toronto. Spend too much time around these guys and you become a little too nonchalent about blood-soaked clothes and bodies in the trunk

Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.

When or if we "quote, unquote" do not like our work, it is probably because we do not feel safe where we go to work. So when you say, what can we do?, the irony is that the best thing we can do is, well one option, is to quit.

If an accident happens in a plant, the aftermath will be unimaginable.

Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.

I am dying. Please ... bring me a toothpick.

All we want is to be treated like human beings, and not to be patronized, or experimented on like guinea pigs.

They tied me back together, but they didn't use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they're dry.

You know what really keeps your staff on their toes? A harpoon gun.

Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on earth to rule all of humanity.

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?