Quotes about Union Recognition

Henry Ford

Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth. Financiers are behind the unions and their object is to kill competition so as to reduce the income of the workers and eventually bring on war. We will never recognize the United Auto Workers Union.

Ford was then 74 years old and had become a very different man than in his youth when he was the hero of labor. He was very paranoid at this time. He even thought that financiers were actually backing the labor unions because their purpose was to go to war against Hitler who Ford greatly admired and supported. See {642379}. He claimed that the way they would do it is to fund the labor unions so most workers would join unions. This he thought would eliminate competition and lower workers’ wages. When workers’ wages were pushed low enough, the workers would demand American entry into the war to create government spending on armaments and a labor shortage to drive wages up again. There was not a single financier who was actually paying or lending any money to labor unions, and most industrialists other than Ford complained that labor unions would always demand higher wages. Ford’s son Edsel was the chief operating officer of Ford Motor Company, and did his best to work around his father to keep the company healthy and deal with a terrible labor relations problem his father caused.

Cass Sunstein

I think that every state in the union should recognize same-sex marriage.

Charles T. Canady

I really can't imagine how anyone could, in good conscience, oppose the proposition that the states should be able to deny the status of marriage to same-sex unions.

Richard Grenell

While religious institutions should be able to pick and choose which unions they bless, civil governments should issue marriage licenses to all couples.

Cesar Chavez

...the workers aren't going to stop struggling. They're going to struggle to have a union and they have the right to have it. The police repression and the grower indifference to the workers' demands for recognition cannot go unheard so we're going to keep on struggling until we get that recognition.

John N. Mitchell

The present miner has had his day; he has been oppressed and ground down and denied the right to live as a human being; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the soot and the noise and the blackness of the breaker. It is for them that we are fighting.

The coal miners’ strike had been going for 5 months. The major issue was the right to union recognition. The mine owners refused to do that and decided to take the strike. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a settlement where the miners won more money but no union recognition. The great appeal and significance of this speech is that it stressed the young children who started working in the mines at ages 8 or 9 by working on the “breakers” where they broke up large chunks of coal into smaller chunks. The children never saw daylight and never had a chance for education much less a childhood. At the time, and well into the 20th century the Republican Party was adamantly opposed to any legislation regulating child labor and when two decades later public opinion finally forced Congress to pass Child Labor legislation, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and it took a Constitutional Amendment. See {32240}, {642469}, and {36885}.

Maggie Gallagher

The first question for me is: Are same-sex unions ‘marriages’? I’m against discrimination, I’m against hatred, I’m in favor of marriage equality, but I don’t think same-sex marriage is marriage. Therefore I think it is wrong for the government to insist, through the use of law, that we all believe that same-sex unions are marriages.

Louis D. Brandeis

Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.

Tony Campolo

That's what they do in Europe. You go down to the city hall and you become legally connected. You have a civil union there. Then, if you're religious, you go down to the church, and the church blesses the union. That gets the problem solved.

Emily Thornberry

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.

Union Recognition Quotes