Worker Ownership Quotes

The Labour Party believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners.

What's the difference between a communist or socialist and a progressive? Revolution or evolution? One requires a gun and the other eats away slowly.

There is, therefore, no solution possible other than an economy directed by the workers through their organisations of control-through the workers' syndicates.

Socialism in America will come through the ballot box.

When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.

Only with the tools of production in their own hands could the workers ever hope to control their own lives and receive the fruits of their labor.

We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.

But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.

The establishment people tell us that if the workers wanted to share the profits, it was called communism. When management wants to share profits, it's called a bonus.

When those who do the work own the machines, when those who toil control the invention, then, and not till then, can the world be civilized or free, When these forces shall do the bidding of the individual, when they become the property of the mechanic instead of the monopoly, when they belong to labor instead of what is called capital, when these great powers are as free to the individual laborer as the air and light are now free to all, then, and not until then, the individual will be restored and all forms of slavery will disappear

Emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, i.e., from organizations of production in which the conditions of work are determined by a master class who own the means of production, and in which the fruits of work are alienated from workers to the benefit of masters.

The remedy [for the Great Depression] is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others, . . . the American way.

If you have worker-owned and worker-managed enterprises, you've got a different sociopolitical system.

The paramount problem... is how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country's industries. Open to the wage-earner of the country the road to proprietorship... not as a gratuity, but as their proper allotment out of the combined forces that have made the enterprise successful.

Labor can and will become its own employer through co-operative association.

A man who tries to make the workmen believe that their employers are their natural enemies is indeed the worst enemy of workmen. For the employees of yesterday are the employers of today, and the employees of today can and will partly be the employers of tomorrow.

We want industry to be in the public sector, to change the power structure of our society...We have not yet carved out of public enterprise a wide enough area of management decision which ought properly to be brought within the ambit of the workers themselves.

There would be no idling in a co-operative workshop. Each workman, being an employer, has a spur to his own industry, and has a pecuniary reason for being watchful of the industry of his fellow workmen.

Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America's vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.

Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have well-known inherent inefficiencies. They're very destructive.

Stakeholders - meaning workers and community - the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?

We will also allow state companies to sell shares to their workers and will pass a law allowing citizens to start companies of their own with no limits on the number of employees or on the firm's output.

I have always been fully persuaded that, through co-operation, labor could become its own employer.

It may never come, but I fancy than no man who has sympathy for the human race does not wish that sometime those who labor should have the whole product of their toil. Probably it will never come, but I wish that the time might come when men who work in the industries would own the industries.

I can't help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people.