Labour Unrest Quotes

Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.

No better strike leader than John N. Mitchell has ever emerged in any time of industrial strife.

There is nothing a worker resents more than to see some man taking his job. A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble.

The clash between capital and labour, between those seeking to maximise profit and those with only their toil to sell, was the driving force for the creation of the trade unions in the 19th century.

Nothing has changed in our relationship with East West. We have no relationship with East West. We've been withholding our labour for almost seven years now.

We've got to stand up for what we believe in as a labour movement. And that means the party's membership needs to be even bigger so it becomes a genuinely mass organisation.

I think there's not much patience for organized labour, period, public or private sector.

Labour, because it chose to remain unintelligent, either became subservient, or insolently believed in damaging the capitalists' goods and machinery or even in killing the capitalists.

The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day.

Not a penny off the pay. Not a minute on the day.

I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike.

The union in many cases is reduced to the level of a facilitator, an agent or a "party" in negotiations. As such, how can it be seen by its members to be an organized and dedicated instrument relentlessly pursuing their aspirations and resolutely protecting their wages, conditions and standards?

The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.

If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

Marikana is a huge wake-up call.

The stark reality facing us today is that without the labour reforms, workers will get neither the income nor jobs in the face of cut-throat global economic competition.

I think the business community is smart enough to realise that just having a trade union is not enough. They are smart enough to know they need to be part of a union that has political and financial power.

You have this disturbing reality that there are a lot of people who would rather say, 'I'm on strike' than 'I'm unemployed.' And those are the people who vote for strikes.

Putting roadblocks in the way of legitimate strike action only increases the likelihood of more wildcat strikes, which in turn will make it that much harder for employers to address legitimate grievances, given that they'll lose the ability to negotiate with recognised union leaders.

You won't catch Liberal Democrats describing trade unionists as wreckers.

There is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn't have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.

It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most ot endanger the harmonious progress of democracy.

Our recent 5-year labour agreements, in Canada as well as the United States, are based upon experience, logic and principle rather than on pressure, propaganda and force.