Working Conditions Quotes

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.

John D. Rockefeller is the greatest murderer the nation had ever produced.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

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.

Factories are the workplaces of our National Socialist racial comrades.

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.

Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.

As labor is the common burden of our race so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden on to the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.

… all experience tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.

The great question will forever remain, who shall work?

When I was young, they used to call me 'foreman,' not because I was in charge, but because I did the work of four men.

With industrialization the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper—as liveried carriages appear, so do barefoot children.

True Americanism recognizes the enormous gravity of the social and labor problems which confront us.

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

I came from a working-class family. My dad was in a union. I never forgot what it was like to be a private.

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

The friends of humanity cannot but wish that in all countries the laboring classes should have a taste for comforts and enjoyments, and that they should be stimulated by all legal means to procure them. There cannot be a better security against a superabundant population.

I've had several working-man songs that I like.

Labor Day 2013 is special. This year marks the centennial of the U.S. Department of Labor - 100 years of working for America's workers.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

From its onset, the labor movement has been at the forefront of the fight to improve working conditions and workplace safety. At the local level, knowing their union has their back gives workers the confidence and support they need to stand up and report harassment, poor working conditions, or workplace safety violations.

People who work make the world live better and to reward these people well is normal. Yet they are not the people who are the wealthiest.