Top 36 American Labor Quotes
#1. American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#2. Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
Jimmy Carter
#3. The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt.
Mary Harris Jones
#4. The trade agreement has become a rather distinct feature of the American labor movement ... It is based on the idea that labor shall accept the capitalist system of production and make terms of peace with it.
Mary Ritter Beard
#5. American labor may now look to the future with confidence.
James J. Davis
#6. The American Labor Movement has consistently demonstrated its devotion to the public interest. It is, and has been, good for all America.
John F. Kennedy
#7. The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.
Grover Cleveland
#8. American labor rights activist, on activities of the National Farm Workers Association Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may.
Frederick Douglass
#9. By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer for the American Labor Party, and my political thinking has not shifted measurably since that time.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#10. There is nothing stronger than the American labor movement. United, we cannot and we will not be turned aside. We'll work for it, sisters and brothers. We'll stand for it. Together. Each of us. To bring out the best in America. To bring out the best in ourselves, and each other.
Richard Trumka
#11. I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.
Tom Morello
#12. We're taking on Social Security as a property rights issue. We figure that every single American has an absolute property right interest in the fruits of his or her own labor. What I work for should be my property.
Malcolm Wallop
#13. Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.
P. J. O'Rourke
#14. A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
Grover Cleveland
#15. Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts, which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied.
John L. Lewis
#16. American working men are principals in the three-member team of capital, management, labor. Never have they regarded themselves as a servile class that could attain freedom only through destruction of the industrial economy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#17. I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.
Zora Neale Hurston
#18. In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world.
Eugene V. Debs
#19. A White House dinner is the American family assembled, from labor leaders to billionaires, actors, architects, academicians and athletes.
Hugh Sidey
#20. Corporations can't have it both ways. They can't tell Americans how much they want us to buy their products, but then run abroad to avoid taxes or hire cheap labor. American corporations should pay their fair share of taxes and create decent-paying jobs here - not in China.
Bernie Sanders
#21. What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?
Douglas A. Blackmon
#22. Last year, I twice voted against the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations bill because it did not adequately fund education in general, and Native American programs specifically.
Rick Renzi
#23. Labour day is a great American holiday that people
celebrate by going out and buying products
made in China
David Letterman
#24. Concentration of wealth and power has been built upon other people's money, other people's business, other people's labor. Under this concentration, independent business has been a menace to American society.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#26. The plain truth is that labor is the chief representative force that keeps the real special interests from dominating American political life.
Lane Kirkland
#27. If every American donated five hours a week, it would equal the labor of 20 million full-time volunteers.
Whoopi Goldberg
#28. The Labor Department's Hall of Honor recognizes men and women - like Cesar Chavez, Helen Keller and the Workers of the Memphis Sanitation Strike - who have made invaluable contributions to the welfare of American workers.
Thomas Perez
#29. Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s.
Linda Chavez
#30. After four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming, a bill owed to us that must be collected.
Malcolm X
#31. The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
Wendell Phillips
#32. In the end, the American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don't always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor.
Julian Castro
#33. Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.
Lamar S. Smith
#34. There was a uniqueness to the American case of slavery. 10 million people, a conservative estimate, were brought to America ... hundreds of people were set up in work camps, and hereditary-forced labor was put in place. That's a very different thing than the personal slavery that existed elsewhere.
Edward Ball
#35. Everything on this earth right now is about labor and slavery. War is the only American export left that anyone wants to buy.
Roseanne Barr
#36. If you would look up bad labor relations in the dictionary, you would have an American Airlines logo beside it.
Elton Joe Kendall
