Ken Loach Quotes

Foreign workers typically migrate to Malaysia willingly, looking for greater opportunities, but often fall into forced labor or debt bondage.

We will make slavery history very soon. We will make child labor history very soon.

I protest against the fitness and truth of the usually received definitions and applications of "slave labor" and "free labor"--and, in contradiction thereto, maintain that, in proportion to the respective populations, there are many more slaves in England, and in very much more suffering and painful conditions, than in all the negro slaveholding States of this Confederation.

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.

By encouraging its citizens to violate our border, Mexico is pushing a tremendous welfare burden off of its shoulders and onto ours, while also benefiting from the significant sums of U.S. currency that these workers will eventually send back home to their families.

The stones in your driveway may have come from the slaves who spend all day breaking rocks because it's cheaper for the company to get them from India, where the labor is free. We are all connected. And we all have human value. That's what my work is about.

In the 'Nike Economy,' there are no standards, no borders and no rules. Clearly, the global economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

No family should have to depend on the labor of its children to put food on the table and no person should be forced to work in captivity.

It was in the sugar hacienda in Negros, Panay and in Central Luzon where I saw the injustices heaped upon the sugar workers, particularly the sacadas, or seasonal workers.

The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children.

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist … The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

It Is Not Linen You're Wearing Out But Human Creatures' Lives.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

The people of Pullman are destitute and starving. Over five thousand human beings are in dire necessity, and appeal to the liberal minded people of Chicago for help. Their unfortunate condition is due to no fault of theirs. They have been noted for their thrift, sobriety, and industry. The fault lies in the hard times and a hard taskmaster.... They have struck against a slavery worse than that of the negroes of the South. They, at least, were well fed and well cared for, while the white slaves of Pullman, worked they ever so willingly, could not earn enough to clothe and feed themselves decently--hardly enough to keep body and soul together. Now that they have struck for a living wage, they find themselves penniless, with gaunt famine and despair staring them in the face.... Help them as you wished to be helped in the hour of affiliation. Their cause is the cause of humanity. Their struggle is the struggle of honest industry against corporate greed

Migration is development.

Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves. Indeed, they have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die.

To the workman we appeal by the memory and traditions of his own sufferings and wrongs to be vigilant to avoid the great guilt of inflicting upon his fellow-citizens the injustice from which he has himself escaped.

We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

“A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,” is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing; yet in what corner of this planet was that ever realized?

I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free laborers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish.

Cossacks, I must tell you that you are the butchers of the Russian workers. Will you continue to be so in the future, or will you acknowledge your own wickedness and join the ranks of the oppressed? Up to now you have shown no respect for the poor workers. For one of the Czar's rubles or a glass of wine, you have nailed them living to the cross.

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.

We're so lucky where we live, but we're so out of touch. Everyone's mindset is made to feel that refugees are a problem, but it's more than that. They're human beings, too. They were forced from their homes.

Forced labor affects the most vulnerable and least protected people, perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty and dependency. Women, low-skilled migrant workers, children, indigenous peoples, and other groups suffering discrimination on different grounds are disproportionately affected.