Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

My grandfather, who brought me up, was a coal miner. I visited the mines with him. I remember it vividly. It was horrible. I'm glad I didn't go into the family business.

I am the son of a mine worker.

Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

I was never afraid to go back to Pittsburgh and work in the steel mills.

The present miner has had his day; he has been oppressed and ground down and denied the right to live as a human being; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the soot and the noise and the blackness of the breaker. It is for them that we are fighting.

I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V., yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

I have so much respect for people who do blue-collar work because I come from that background myself.

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.

I just have this deep kind of connection to reality of being like... in a way, I feel like a dock worker. I want to stay in connection with my dock-worker side, 'cause that's how I grew up.

We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

I’m not going to go down in coal mines like Mrs. Roosevelt.

The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America … In the Lancashire cotton mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood), children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural labourers were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first effect of machinery in England.

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

Dad was a machinist who had to work hard - harder than any man I have ever known.

My family is blue-collar - coal miners and steelworkers. My father was an automobile mechanic, and us boys were brought up to work. I used to pump gasoline at 11 cents a gallon. I thought I would like to be a first-rate mechanic; a respected, hard-working man.

I grew up with a bunch of factory workers.

People I grew up with, my family, work in the oil fields. Everyone works a labor job - construction, concrete. All we know is work. It's a physical culture.

My dad started off in scrap metal, real men doing men's jobs.

I come from a family of coal miners.