Jan Schakowsky Quotes

Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do.

Unions do have a proper role in negotiating for employees and advising employees, but they have to engage with the employer.

A mutual arrangement, I repeat, is the only satisfactory medium whereby the present system can be carried on with any degree of satisfaction, and in such an arrangement the employers have more to gain than the workers.

We are just interested in dealing with the people we're paying every day. We know federal law allows them to vote in a union at anytime, but we think we can resist that by talking to our own people and giving them enough upside.

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

If there is to be peace in our industrial life, let the employer recognize his obligation to his employees

There are no employees without employers.

Workers organized and fought for worker rights and food safety, Social Security and Medicare - they fought to change government. And they won.

If there is to be peace in our industrial life let the employer recognize his obligation to his employees - at least to the degree set forth in existing statutes.

The Bush administration staunchly opposed legislation which would preserve overtime pay for all workers.

If we are going to reverse the race to the bottom, workers must have the right to engage in collective bargaining.

Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.

To fulfill the promise of economic opportunity, we must remain true to the principle that collective bargaining is a cornerstone of a free society and indispensable to a strong middle class.

I would say the issue for the labor movement in the United States is not structural... there is no correlation between the success of workers and how the labor movement is structured.

If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more.

Many people do not realize that where unions have bargaining rights employers cannot raise wages or improve benefit plans any more than they can reduce them without of the consent of the union.

Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth because they take away a man's independence.

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

I am glad to see a system of labor ... under which laborers can strike when they want to.

Thank God we have a system of labor where there can be a strike.

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.

My heart lies with the workers.

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters [employers] and their workmen, its counselors [members of the legislature] are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

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.

We're the party that's fought for increased wages, fought for the union movement, fought to make sure that collective bargaining is not eviscerated, it's strengthened. And when we communicate those messages, we succeed.