Ramsay MacDonald Quotes

The history of all countries shows that, by its own efforts, the working class can develop only a trade-union consciousness—that is, the realization of the need of getting together in unions in order to fight employers and to demand from the government the passing of laws necessary for the workers.

Fight labor's demands to the last ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes itself sovereign and takes what it used to ask.

It is essential that there be organization of labor…. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

My heart lies with the workers.

there is nothing more American than the trade-union movement.

The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back.

Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

It’s not about the budget; it’s about the power...So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.

I am a proud trade unionist.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

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.

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.

In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.

Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.

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.

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

Labor has no quarrel with capital, as such. It is merely the possessors of capital who refuse to accord to labor the recognition, the right, the justice which is the laborers' due, with whom we contend.

What shall the workers do? Sit idly by and see the vast resources of nature and the human mind be utilized and monopolized for the benefit of the comparative few? No. The laborers must learn to think and act, and soon, too, that only by the power of organization, and common concert of action, can either their manhood be maintained, their rights to life (work to sustain it) be recognized, and liberty and rights secured.

The labor movement has failed to capture the support of the public at large.

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.

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