Trade Unions Quotes

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 problem with unions is they breed mediocrity.

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

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

The Labour Party is and always has been an instinctive part of my life.

Modern trade unions understood that deciphering a balance sheet was more important than decoding Das Kapital.

The internationalization of capital is making it more difficult for trade union organizations safeguard workers’ interest. It is limiting the ability of the Government … to accomplish the national objectives defined by the democratic process.

If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.

I believe in corporations. I believe in trade unions. Both have come to stay and are necessities in our present industrial system, But where, either one or the other, there develops corruption or mere brutal indifference to the rights of others … then the offender, whether union or corporation, must be fought.

Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad.

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stock quotations …a public library full of old newspapers and dog-eared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of big-mouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U. S. A is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of the address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

I support collective bargaining everywhere.

The [Russian] Communist Party decided that policy. As a good communist, I have to go along.

The labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.

[The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves.

Getting political representation is important, but change comes through using direct action, campaigning, and trade unions.

I have seen the face of this country change in 25 years or 30 years. I have seen a equalization begin to develop - in inheritance laws, tax laws, laws for favoring trade unions, protecting them, and so forth. All these are social changes.

If I were transported into my father's shoes, I would have been a Labour supporter, too, because in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, the Conservatives weren't standing up for working people; there was too much of an interest in corporatism, and that didn't start to change till Margaret Thatcher came along.

The Social-Democratic Federation took part in all the political and economic struggles of the English working class; it took pains to bring Socialist views home to them, not only through agitation and propaganda, but also by actions.

Corbyn is about 1970s Bennite control.

The labor movement is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.

The social and moral issues are all on the side of free trade. And it is you, and people like you, who introduce protection who are the ones who are violating fundamental moral and social issues. Tell me, what trade union represents the workers who are displaced because high tariffs reduce exports from this country, because high tariffs make steel and other goods more expensive, and as a result, those industries that use steel have to charge higher prices, they have fewer employees, the export industries that would grow up to balance the imports, tell me what union represents them? What moral and ethical view do you have about their interests?

Men trade unionists are accused of sex privilege and prejudice ... A belief in the divine right of every man to his job is not peculiar to kings and capitalists, and men in organized trades are not disposed to share these advantages with a host of women competitors.

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.

From 1918 on, trade unionists were to express from the platforms of their congresses the workers' desire for peace through a rational organization of the world.