Auberon Herbert Quotes

The employer class is less indispensable in the modern organization of industries because the laboring men themselves possess sufficient intelligence to organize into co-operative relation and enjoy the entire benefits of their own labor.

I have always been fully persuaded that, through co-operation, labor could become its own employer.

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.

Only with the tools of production in their own hands could the workers ever hope to control their own lives and receive the fruits of their labor.

I will never apologize for standing up for my fellow Teamsters and all American workers.

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?

No strike is a loss or failure to the workers, even if the point sought is not gained for the time being. If naught else they teach the capitalists that they are expensive luxuries.

And if you are going to truly stand with workers, it also means embracing solidarity, not attempting through lame talking points to pit union workers against non-union workers.

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

I came from a family where joining a union was the expected thing to do. I've always believed that the relationship between an employer and an individual worker is fundamentally unequal.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

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

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

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

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

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

Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth because they take away a man's independence.

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

It is gratifying that societies of this kind [labor unions], composed either of workers alone or of workers and employers together, are being formed everywhere, and it is truly to be desired that they grow in number and in active vigor.

Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class. The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working class in possession of economic power.

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

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.

The strike and the boycott, they have cost us much. What they have not paid us in wages, better working conditions, and new contracts, they have paid us in self-respect and human dignity

We should not idealize unions. Occasionally they were corrupt, and sometimes enforced inefficiency. But they helped keep us a middle class society because they provided a counterweight to the power of wealthy individuals and corporations.