379 Quotes About Labor

Ensuring labor protections and citizenship status is the most ethical and effective counter to the far right's anti-migrant racism. Otherwise, attacks on migrant workers -- buttressed by ubiquitous anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Roma and anti-Latinx racism -- will continue to work as intended for capitalist interests: channeling irregular migration into precarious migration, lowering the wage floor for all workers, and expanding carceral governance.

Whoever climbs the tree to fetch the fruit should be the one to eat it.

What keeps me in New York is neither the high culture of museums and concert halls nor the unrivaled opportunities for working, eating, and spending that New Yorkers revel in. Rather it is a sensibility that is distinctly working-class—generous; open-minded but skeptical; idealistic but deflating of pretension; bursting with energy and a commitment to doing.

Let Labor and Capital bicker amongst each other, while I, as idle Aristocracy, twiddle my fiddle in my pastoral idyll.

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.

There’s no such thing as common sense. There’s just sense, and it’s not very common.

Who is there that can be handsomely Supported in Affluence, Ease and Pleasure by another, that will chuse rather to earn his Bread by the Sweat of his own Brows?

A commitment to expanding democracy is at the core of all good socialist thinking. Democracy is the principle that people ought to have a say over decisions that affect them, and that they should be in control of their own lives rather than being subjected to the wishes of powerful economic and political elites.

Gowen finally gave up on December 13, 1889. He secluded himself in a Washington hotel room, pulled out a gun and, in morbid imitation of his old enemies, killed a mine official—himself.