Fiorello H. La Guardia Quotes

To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of the machines of flesh and blood

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

Your Irish railways employ thousands of men, whose working hours average twelve per day. Were they restricted to a forty-eight-hour week of labor, employment would he provided for thousands of Irishmen who at present are driven exiles from their native land.

Limitation of the working day to eight hours for all hired workers. ... A complete ban on overtime work. The prohibition of the employment of children of school age.... A ban on the use of female labour in occupations which are harmful to the health of women The provision of nurseries for infants and young children in all ...enterprises employing women. State insurance for workers against old age and partial or complete disability The establishment of properly organized health inspection in all enterprises...free medical services for workers at the employer's expense, with wages to be paid during time of illness

The most fervid demand, however, of all the workers on strike was for a shorter day … 10½ hours instead or 13 hours as formerly, or even 14 and 16 reckoning the time of cleaning machinery.

The Ford Motor Company, the greatest and most successful automobile manufacturing company in the world, will, on January 12, inaugurate the greatest revolution in the matter of rewards for its workers in the industrial world. At one stroke, it will reduce the hours of labor from 9 to 8, and add to every man’s pay a share of the profits of the house. The smallest to be received by a man 22 years old and upward was $5 a day.

It is right that people should have a statuary right to holidays and a maximum working week. It is right that part-time workers should have the same equality when it comes to hourly rates.

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.

We must have modern conditions to meet modern machinery. As labor-saving devices are installed and used for production we must necessarily shorten the number of hours per day, and we are now at the state where we will necessarily have to come to a five day week because, gentlemen, you cannot have prosperity unless you have employment.

It was repugnant to my convictions and my experience so far to encroach upon the independence of the worker, in his professional life and his rights as the head of a family, as to forbid him by law to exploit his own working capacities, and those of his family, according to his own judgment. I do not believe that the workingman is in himself grateful because he is forbidden to earn money on certain days, and during certain hours, as he may choose.

This is far too heavy a draft upon the energies of the workmen of any industry …. The working forces [should] have time for leisure … and family life.

Workmen are not machinery but intelligent and high strung individuals.

It [the government] has failed to make the proper adjustments so that the invention of NEW MACHINERY instead of throwing workers out of employment, will only shorten the hours of work for all labor.

The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.

We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we're now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.

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.

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.

My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union.

It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work.

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

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

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

He who builds a factory builds a temple; he who works there worships there.