Heather Cox Richardson Quotes

The higher the unemployment rate, the more leverage I have to 'encourage' you to 'do what it takes' to keep your job. And so you work even more hours, pushing unemployment up and wages down. And that, my friends, is one of the little tricks that keeps you poor and me rich.

In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.

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.

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist … The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

Nor can one class appropriate the produce of the labour of another class, as the capitalists now appropriate and enjoy the wealth which the powers of the working man daily call into existence. It is inequality of exchanges which enables one class to live in luxury and idleness, and dooms another to incessant toil

It is a sad commentary upon our form of government when every decision of the Supreme Court seems designed to fatten capital and starve and destroy labor.

Pullman, who has grown so rich from the toil of his workingmen, that he can riot in luxury, while he heartlessly turns these very workmen out of their tenements into the streets and leave to the tender mercies of corporate greed.

For the laboring class there cannot exist a peace of compromise on the basis of a capitalist regime

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.

Capitalism, even 150 years ago, was more inclusive; there was more of a sense of social responsibility…. Today the system doesn’t seem to be as fair or inclusive. It doesn’t seem to be helping broader society.

When we are not extracting wealth from nature, we are extracting it from the working and middle classes.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

We've got to keep an eye on the battle that we face - a war on workers. And you see it everywhere. It is the Tea Party. And there's only one way to beat and win that war - the one thing about working people is, we like a good fight.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Wage theft, worker rights and workplace discrimination should not be swept under the rug. The United States cannot have a functional economy where all the gains go to the corporate class while all the pain goes to regular workers.

Any reasonable economist will tell you that it's nearly impossible to isolate the impact of right-to-work laws on a state's job growth. A multitude of other factors intervene. However, one thing the numbers can show is that right-to-work laws have a negative effect on the wages of workers in that state.

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 Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

One of the most disruptive forces in politics is the feeling that wealth is concentrated in the hands of an alien people.