Unions Quotes

“I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Since I had the inclinatation and the training, helping people came naturally. I wasn't thinking in terms of organizing members, but just a duty that I had to do. That goes back to my mother's training. It was not until later that I realized that this was a good organizing tool, although maybe unconsciously, I was already beggining to understand.

But I was used by people for a long time until I wised up. It wasn't that they wanted to do it, but that I was not prepared or able to tell them what to do in return. My work was just another war on poverty gimick, which is what happens when people are given everything and don't give anything in return. you can't mold them into any action.

Well, one night it just hit me. Once you helped people, most became very loyal. The people who helped us back when we wanted volunteers were the people we had helped. So I began to get a group of those people around me.

Once I realized helping people was an organizing technique, I increased that work. I was willing to work all day and night and go to hell and back for people- provided they also did something for the CSO in return. I never felt bad asking for that. It didn't contradict my parents' teachings, because I wasn't asking for something for myself.

For a long time we didn't know how to put that work together into an organization. But we learned after a while- we learned how to help people by making them responsible. Today it's the same principle with the Union. And it works. We don't get everybody, but we get enough to get that nucleus. I think solving problems for people is the only way to build solid groups.”
― Cesar Chavez

“Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?”
― Douglas Wilson

“Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”
― William Cullen Bryant

“We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can't afford to fix them one at a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“It's voting rights or it's the filibuster.
It's LGBTQ+ rights or it's the filibuster.
It's union rights or it's the filibuster.
It's civil rights or it's the filibuster.
It's our rights or it's the filibuster.

The choice is easy.

(3/18/2021 on Twitter)”
― Cori Bush

“The working people of the Flint area hated this rag, but it was our only daily so you read it. Everyone called it the "Flint Urinal." Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong side of every major social and political issue of the twentieth century -- "the wrong side" meaning: whatever side the union workers were on, the Urinal took the opposite position.”
― Michael Francis Moore, Here Comes Trouble

“Once government undertakes to determine the whole wage structure and is thereby forced to control employment and production, there will be a far greater destruction of the present powers of the unions than their submission to the rule of equal law would involve. Under such a system the unions will have only the choice between becoming the willing instrument of governmental policy an being incorporated into the machinery of government, on the one hand, and being totally abolished, on the other. The former alternative is more likely to be chosen, since it would enable the existing union bureaucracy to retain their position and some of their personal power. But to the workers it would mean complete subjection to the control by a corporative state. The situation in most countries leaves us no choice but to await some such outcome or to retrace our steps. The present position of the unions cannot last, for they can function only in a market economy which they are doing their best to destroy.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

“Socialists have advocated numerous ways of democratizing the economy, from setting up worker cooperatives to nationalizing major industries... At the core of economic democracy is the notion that control should not be vested in a small group of people, but in the people who do the labor. Managers and owners shouldn't decide what the workers have to do, the workers should decide what managers have to do (or if they need managers at all). And they should own the workplaces themselves.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization.

Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone.

Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions.

Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor.

Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.

These various techniques of social control were successful.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Most labor historians today agree that craft unions created an aristocracy of skilled workers at the expense of the unskilled and semiskilled and, at the same time, retarded the further organization of American industry, thus, in the long run, adversely affecting all workers, skilled as well as unskilled.”
― Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619-1973

“We need an uprising to guarantee that the bullies with unchecked and unlimited power and money do not continue getting away with abusing employees in most workplaces. We need a #MeToo movement for bullied and silenced American employees!”
― Louis Yako

“it’s three strikes and you’re out of the union”
― J.S. Mason, The Ghost Therapist...And Other Grand Delights

“Union protagonists can be permitted a moment of nostalgia for this 'little' labor movement which no longer exists, nor can ever exist again, but which, while it lasted, was free of the specific problems that bedevil the labor movement today when by force of circumstance it has been separated a few notches farther from the rank and file.”
― Sidney Lens, The Crisis of American Labor

“But the lesson of those years is that the ruling class can't be relied upon to redistribute wealth and power.”
― Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010

“[1916] The IWW’s involvement in the [Minnesota] Iron Range’s labor unrest led mine company owners to take extreme actions and, just as in other conflict locations, they mobilized the businesses and municipal offices under their ownership. All mail and telegrams to and from Virginia were halted and reviewed. In other locations, including Biwabik, Aurora, and Eveleth, general stores turned away miners and their famlies. When the strikers formed their own cooperative for supplies and groceries, Oliver Iron Mining Company pressured wholesalers to serve notice that all credit would be curtailed pending the strike, and that payments for supplies must be made weekly. Meanwhile Sheriff Meining publicly announced new jail sentences for other agitators and miners for simply saying, “Hello Fellow Worker,” carrying a red IWW membership card, or discussing industrial unionism on public streets.”
― Jane Little Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family

“In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Hello Mrs Cannon,' said Melanie. 'Friday wants me to distract you so that she can get Parker to say something that isn't on his official scripts.'
'Really?' said Mrs Cannon. 'That sounds intriguing. Much more intriguing than this unspeakably boring polo match. Why don't you pretend to sprain your ankle, then I could pretend to be concerned?'
'Okay,' said Melanie. 'Does that mean I can lie down?'
'I wouldn't dream of trying to stop you,' said Mrs Cannon. 'I just wish I could do the same.'
'You could say you had a fainting spell,' suggested Melanie.
'What a good idea,' said Mrs Cannon. 'If you've got a sprained ankle and I have a fainting spell, then we can both have a nice rest on the grass.'
'The Headmaster can't complain about that,' said Melanie as they both made themselves comfortable.
'Of course not,' said Mrs Cannon. 'If he did I'd report him to my union.”
― R.A. Spratt, Big Trouble

“While I have never been a member of any union, I was a friend of Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, whom I met after my history of the New York City schools was published. His successor, Sandra Feldman, was also my friend, and I am friends with her successor, Randi Weingarten, who was elected AFT president in 2008.”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“The horror of unemployment is the final undoing of the worker. When he sees this confronting him he sells himself regardless of the intrinsic worth of his ability. Labor unions and collective bargaining arose to give him some show of power and dignity.”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“The workers stayed in the plant instead of walking out, and this had clear
advantages: they were directly blocking the use of strikebreakers; they
did not have to act through union officials but were in direct control
of the situation themselves; they did not have to walk outside in the
cold and rain, but had shelter; they were not isolated, as in their work,
or on the picket line; they were thousands under one roof, free to
talk to one another, to form a community of struggle. Louis Adamic,
a labor writer, describes one of the early sit-downs:

Sitting by their machines, cauldrons, boilers and work benches, they talked.
Some realized for the first time how important they were in the process of
rubber production. Twelve men had practically stopped the works! . . . Superintendents, foremen, and straw bosses were dashing about. . . . In less than
an hour the dispute was settled, full victory for the men.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“Rochester became a magnet for African Americans in the twentieth century, one of many northern industrial cities that blacks flocked to during their six-decade-long Great Migration from the rural South. From 1950 to 1960, Rochester's total population had declined slightly, from about 332,000 to 319,000. But its black population had risen appreciably over the same period, tripling to nearly 24,000. Those who'd come to Smugtown were hungry for a better life. What they encountered upon their arrival, however, was mainly disappointment. Mirroring trends found across the country, many blacks in Rochester were forced to live in substandard housing as whites fled the urban core. The city's power structure remained almost exclusively white. And many blacks struggled to find decent jobs. Even though the unemployment rate in Rochester had fallen to about 2 percent in the summer of 1964, 14 percent of blacks were counted as without work. The big Kodak dollar and the lawn sprinklers of the suburbs have seemed both tantalizingly near and hopelessly far to the inner-city man," said an African American barber.”
― Rick Wartzman, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America

“The negro workers are still unaware of the force that can give them union organization; happy industrialists.”
― King Albert I of Belgium

“Say," I said, "do you guys cross picket lines?"

The ChronoGuard agents looked at each other, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.

"She's right, Mr. Lavoisier, sir. I don't mind bullying and killing innocents, and I'll follow you beyond the crunch normally, but - "

"But what?" asked Lavoisier angrily.

"-but I am a loyal TimeGuild member. I don't cross picket lines.”
― Jasper Forde, Lost in a Good Book

“A labor union is revolutionary in fact. It is not the expressed desire to change the world; it is the change already embodied if not completed.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]

“The cities change. The bus line is different. The train runs on another track, but the scene is the same. Everyday in America, South Africa and other places in the world like them. Black people. My people. Travelin. To be cooks, janitors, housekeepers, porters, days workers, servants, Black boys, Beige girls, Brown daddies, Ebony mothers.”
― Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae

“Solidarity: the ultimate working-class superpower”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“Ditching solidarity is never the answer.”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“In Dr. King's last speech, he said, "Either we go up together; or we go down together."

Solidarity was his final gift.”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“We are on the precipice of history… a moment where prospects that seemed unattainable are more possible than ever before. Unions, Equality, and Kamala: Why This Election Matters to Me (Medium Story)”
― Carlos Wallace