George Mortimer Pullman Quotes

The owners have the right to pay you whatever they want to. They don't have to pay you if they don't want to.

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.

The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions.

There can be no distress, there can be no hard times, when labor is well paid. The man who raises his hand against the progress of the workingman raises his hand against prosperity.

What labor is demanding all over the world today is not a few material things like more dollars and fewer hours of work, but the right to a voice in the conduct of industry.

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

Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.

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

Labor: a man coins himself into his labor,—turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all, and constitutions and governments exist for that,—to protect and insure it to the laborer.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

Instead of focusing on attacking unions and the labor movement, we need to find ways to strengthen and empower workers so we can put more money in the pockets of middle class families.

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.

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.

Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts, which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied.

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.

In Finland, where 80 percent of workers belong to unions, all employees enjoy at least 30 days paid vacation, and the gap between the rich and poor is far more equitable than in the United States.

By the mid-1950s, more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie.

If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone - perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers' bottom lines.

The organized workers of America, free in their industrial life, conscious partners in production, secure in their homes and enjoying a decent standard of living, will prove the finest bulwark against the intrusion of alien doctrines of government.

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

To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.

They only ask for a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work.

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.

Unions may also legitimately resort to strikes where this is the only available means to the justice owed to workers