Industrial Labor Quotes

I've been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

Workers in industry are the partners in war of the fighting forces.

I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a communist.

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

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.

I grew up with a bunch of factory workers.

My father worked in a tyre factory. My mother worked as a teacher.

Workers are basically supervisors of machines.

Then we'll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry.

The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.

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.

I didn't work on the killing floor. I worked in the section where you break the meat down and package it.

My parents were immigrants. And the place for all immigrants was the factories. They were the source of cheap labor.

I worked at the Steel Company Of Wales when I was 17. My job was to supply tools to the guys working the blast furnaces.

The first job I ever had was at a pool-liner-manufacturing plant. Minimum wage was $4.25, and that's what I was making. It was this huge, hot, un-air-conditioned factory staffed with all women and me. This is in Georgia, during the summertime, so it was pretty ridiculous.

The last blue collar job I had, I was 29. Even 'Childish Prodigy,' I had a day job that whole time. Those early ones, they feel like psychedelic, blue collar records. Especially 'God Is Saying This to You,' there's such urgency in that album.

I am the son of a mine worker.

The blue-collar culture, it's not really a buttoned-up aesthetic. It's a heavy-labor thing because you're, like, sweating.

I'm a factory-floor actor: I learn the lines, I get there on time.

Sometimes it seemed to me I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north, to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor fight is at least fought by grown men.

The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture" and away from his "materialistic" preoccupations.

I'm the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He went to work in the same lace mill every day for 50 years. He believed he passed it down to my dad, who passed it down to me, that if he did what he was supposed to do, he'd have a good life and his kids would have an even better life. That is the American dream. That is what we believe in, that's what we've got to keep going generation after generation.

I remember I used to think my dad was really cool working at a factory. He used to make buttons. I used to brag, 'This button here, My dad made it.' There was this sense of pride. It's knowing your dad is doing something cool.