James Callaghan Quotes

When the unions were fighting me 45 years ago, they could never beat me.

No strike is a loss or failure to the workers, even if the point sought is not gained for the time being. If naught else they teach the capitalists that they are expensive luxuries.

The number of men out on strike exceeds that of any other industrial contest in the history of our country.

I look back at history, and some of the worst governments we've ever had, you know one of the first things they ever did? They went after the trade unions.

I think we will see a united labor movement again. When workers unite they're stronger. The same goes for unions.

I was an organizer in the Food, Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union down in North Carolina.

A labor strike will tear away a lot of the good things going for this league.

Without the power of the Industrial Union behind it, Democracy can only enter the State as the victim enters the gullet of the Serpent.

Having spent a number of my younger years with trade-union parents attending NUT annual conferences, I feel comfortable with an agenda in my hand and a procedural format for debate.

I'm a passionate trade unionist.

We could see the Teamsters coming in from New Jersey, the AFL-CIO from Chicago. You could see all of the people being bused in.

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

Trade unionism is not a discovery or a formula. It grew and evolved slowly out of the needs of human experience.

The strongest form of fight against the capitalist class is the strike. Strikes are necessary, ever again, against the capitalists’ tendency to increase their profits by lowering wages and increase the hours or the intensity of work.

The trade union, which originated under the European system, destroys liberty.

The task is before us. We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized. We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized by the masters….the labor unions of America are being broken up because there is not sufficient unified understanding, because there is not sufficient leadership to save them.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

The strike is the weapon of the industrial jungle.

We back Solidarity [the Polish trade union], and bust our unions.

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

Rather than negotiate with the teachers’ unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

Mitchell is only a common coal miner who has worked with his hands for 15 years, and is now a labor agitator. Any negotiations with him would unduly recognize a mere rabble-rouser..

We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.

I'm not anti-union.

There will never be a fighters' union. Ever.