Unfair Labor Quotes

Free trade should not mean free labor.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul....

Clearly, the Global Economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

A [typical] worker is a part-time slave.

Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

The competitive pressure to produce, buy, and sell to our global multi-national companies is so intense that contractors in supply chains are motivated to pay low wages, intensify exploitative conditions, keep workers fearful with insecure work contracts, or simply sack workers who have formed a union to fight back.

If this goes into sweatshop labor, I'm quitting this podcast.

I remember, and I will never forget, one day - I was six years old and I was playing beside the road and this plantation owner drove up to me and stopped and asked me "could I pick some cotton." I told him I didn't know and he said, "Yes, you can. I will give you things that you want from the commissary store," and he named a huge list that he called off. I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again.

There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.

[Arguing against child labor:] Is it not a cruel civilization that allows little hearts and little shoulders to strain under these grown-up responsibilities.

There are people who would like to get rid of minimum wage. But we have to have it, because if we didn't some people would not get paid money. They would work all week for two loaves of bread and some Spam.

I thought I was making fifty dollars a week [at MGM], but it turned out to be $35 because twelve weeks of the year you were on layoff. It was white slavery, and it lasted for seventeen years.

Wage violations are tantamount to theft.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.

The ox suffers, the cart complains.

Who gets the risks? The risks are given to the consumer, the unsuspecting consumer and the poor work force. And who gets the benefits? The benefits are only for the corporations, for the money makers.

That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living.

Wealth is being generated off the back of oppression and abuse.

What the president is doing is flooding the job market with illegal immigrants that he is giving temporary work permits to. Not fair.

When I was a dancer, I would see that dancers were treated like garbage. I mean like, like extras.

Too long, that some may rest, tired millions toil unblest.

Donald Trump used undocumented labor to build the Trump Tower. He underpaid undocumented workers, and when they complained, he basically said what a lot of employers do: "You complain, I'll get you deported."

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

Goods produced under conditions which do not meet a rudimentary standard to decency should be regarded as contraband and not allowed to pollute the channels of international commerce.