58 Quotes by Bill Shorten

My preference is that employees pay their union dues, but what I also get is that I'd rather someone be in the union than not in the union.

I think it is a cornerstone of our electoral system that you raise electoral funds for elections but that doesn't mean that therefore the implication can be made that the recipients are incapable of transacting their interests and their duties towards people any differently.

What I believe to be every Australian's right - a good, safe job with proper pay and conditions.

Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labors monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.

What I've done as a union leader and what literally thousands of other union representatives do, is make sure that we have co-operation in the workplace. What I get is that where employees are well treated, employers do well.

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death.

Modern Australian trade unionism and the unionist that I am doesn't rely on a class war view that somehow that the interests of employees and managers are in two separate spheres and they're irreconcilable. I believe that when people can go to work and be happy, satisfied, engaged, where the employer is getting employees who feel their interests are aligned with the employer, you get productivity. This is the future of Australian workplaces.

We're not slaves if we're workers, we're not owned by our employers.

They are able to point the camera around the various parts of their fairly cramped environment.