Theodore Zeldin Quotes

Misclassification means workers are denied not just minimum wage and overtime but other social safety net protections like workers' compensation and unemployment insurance.

All people shall have the right and the obligation to work.

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.

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

The shorter working day is the most essential thing in the lives of industrial workers. It means opportunities for life and self-development which are shut out by the whir of the machinery and the routine of the factory job at which the day is spent. It means also more efficiency on the job and better service to the employer.

The Republican Party is bringing out here onto the floor of Congress an all-out assault on the protection of the rights of people who work in the fields of our country, in the factories of our country, in the offices of our country.

Only with the tools of production in their own hands could the workers ever hope to control their own lives and receive the fruits of their labor.

Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.

Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work.

My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California, where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.

We've waged war on work. We have collectively agreed, stupidly, that work is the enemy.

Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers.

But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

All workers want is a fair shake.

People are still willing to do an honest day's work. The trouble is they want a week's pay for it.

There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job - they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?

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.

I usually spend my free time worrying about when I'm going to work next.

We need to give workers more control over their training, health care, and their pensions.

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.

A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work is ever my partner’s motto.

A journal produced by office-boys for office-boys.

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

The 35-hour week has from the moment of its inception been a massive mistake. We need to return to people the joy of work.