Leon Jouhaux Quotes

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.

[William Z.] Foster was a trade union organizer without a peer. In each case, however, his work was permitted and controlled by other forces which Foster had to serve....

The task is before us. We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized. We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized by the masters….the labor unions of America are being broken up because there is not sufficient unified understanding, because there is not sufficient leadership to save them.

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.

We back Solidarity [the Polish trade union], and bust our unions.

There is no way whereby our labor movement may be assured sustained progress in determining its policies and its plans other than sincere democratic deliberation until a unanimous decision is reached. This may seem a cumbrous, slow method to the impatient, but the impatient are more concerned for immediate triumph than for the education of constructive development.

I look back at history, and some of the worst governments we've ever had, you know one of the first things they ever did? They went after the trade unions.

If I were the president of the United States, I would make unions illegal. They no longer serve a functional purpose in democracy, in my view.

I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.

I think we will see a united labor movement again. When workers unite they're stronger. The same goes for unions.

I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

In the past we couldn't talk to non-union workers. Now we can at least talk to non-union workers so we'll be mobilizing them and educating them not for just six or eight months before an election, but we'll be doing it year-round.

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.

This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.

And the success of the union movement, historically, has always been to benefit all working men and women - not just people who belong to the union.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

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

I'm a passionate trade unionist.

Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

We could see the Teamsters coming in from New Jersey, the AFL-CIO from Chicago. You could see all of the people being bused in.

My problem with unions is they breed mediocrity.

It is true that they paid much more attention to the trade unions because the trade unions were after all speaking for the rights and conditions of working men and women in their employment.

The working class owes all honor and respect to the first men who planted the standard of labor solidarity on the hostile frontier of unorganized industry.