David Blunkett Quotes

Everything is produced by the workers, and the minute they try to get something by their unions they meet all the opposition that can be mustered by those who now get what they produce.

I think the business community is smart enough to realise that just having a trade union is not enough. They are smart enough to know they need to be part of a union that has political and financial power.

At Leeds the idea of an international labour organization appeared in a trade-union text which also drew attention to the danger to the working classes inherent in the existence of international capitalist competition.

The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

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 only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.

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.

The labor movement was a reaction to capitalism.

It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed.

A man who tries to make the workmen believe that their employers are their natural enemies is indeed the worst enemy of workmen. For the employees of yesterday are the employers of today, and the employees of today can and will partly be the employers of tomorrow.

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 General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

It means that the men who hold the means of life control our lives, and, because we workingmen have tried to get some measure of justice, some measure of betterment, they deny the right of the human being to associate with his fellow.

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

The stark reality facing us today is that without the labour reforms, workers will get neither the income nor jobs in the face of cut-throat global economic competition.

Without Socialism the working class is a heterogeneous mixture of different categories, some of which have independent, varying interests, sometimes opposed to each other.

Not a penny off the pay. Not a minute on the day.

The union in many cases is reduced to the level of a facilitator, an agent or a "party" in negotiations. As such, how can it be seen by its members to be an organized and dedicated instrument relentlessly pursuing their aspirations and resolutely protecting their wages, conditions and standards?

Many of those who helped to lay the foundations of the trade union movement were men who had been through the experience of Socialism and found their way to sounder policies.

Regardless of the degree of class consciousness of their members, the trade unions are, by their very nature, driven on to the revolutionary goal.

Universal economic evils afflicting the working class can be eradicated only by a universal working-class movement. Such a movement of the working class is impossible while separate craft and wage agreements are made favoring the employer against other crafts in the same industry, and while energies are wasted in fruitless jurisdictional struggles which serve only to further the personal aggrandizement of union officials.

Trade unionism means the enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.

Labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.

In truth, also, however the matter may be disguised, the combinations among workmen to obtain higher wages, which are now so general and so much complained of, are practical attacks on the claims of capital…. On the side of the labourers there is physical strength, for they are more numerous than their opponents. They are also fast losing that reverence for their opponents which was and is the source of their power, and they are daily acquiring a moral strength which results from a common interest and a close and intimate union …

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food