Labor Quotes

Adolph Strasser, testifying before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1885.
Strasser, head of the Cigar Maker’s Union and one of the founders of the American Federation of Labor, who died on January 1, 1939.

2019.01.01 UC Radio

Labor Quotes

Notable quotes about labor, unions, work, workers and working

We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We fight only for immediate objects-objects that can be realized in a few years.

“If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

I could get rid of all the workers who earn… $15 an hour and bring in a contract house that will pay their laborers $7 an hour. But that breaks the spirit and trust of the employees. If you close a factory because you can get work done for $2 an hour elsewhere, you break the American Dream.

We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions… Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts.

The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.

Nothing counts but pressure, pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure through broad organized aggressive mass action.

At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.

“Salvation for a race, nation or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.”

“Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.”

A solid contract, is, in a very real sense, another Emancipation Proclamation.