Labor Union Sayings

#1. In the ten years I was president of the Teamsters, I had raised the membership from eight hundred thousand to more than 2 million and made it the largest single labor union the world.

Jimmy Hoffa

#2. The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#3. Well, look, let me put it this way. Back in 2005, when I was a freshman, I - I was the first Democrat to support CAFTA. My labor union folks made me their number-one target. They came after me, and I'm still here.

Henry Cuellar

#4. He was leading those who risked their lives over that bridge in Selma, not Janice Joplin, Columbia University, or a labor union. It wasn't John Lennon that taught people about love and peaceful resistance - that job fell on the shoulders of a Jewish carpenter.

Glenn Beck

#5. The president's attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it a labor union that delivers money and votes for him ... Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and the abuse of power.

Cliff Asness

#6. You have got to unite in the same labor union and in the same political party and strike and vote together, and the hour you do that, the world is yours.

Eugene V. Debs

#7. I feel sometimes that there's this sense that people are poor because they want to be, or they're working-class because they want to be or because they don't work hard enough. I feel like there's this demonization of working people in general, but specifically definitely labor union members.

Linda Sanchez

#8. In the no-nonsense school of adversity, which we did not choose for ourselves, we are learning how to operate a labor union.

Cesar Chavez

#9. I listen. I meet with everybody, I don't care what their political persuasion is - whether it be a labor union or small-business folks or individuals who have problems. But I meet with everybody and listen.

Tom Latham

#10. We have seen a central government promote the power of labor-union bosses, and in turn be supported by that power, until it has become entirely too much a government of and for one class, which is exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted most to prevent.

Robert W. Welch Jr.

#11. There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. That is his right. It is his legal right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right, and no one can or dare question his exercise of that legal right.

Samuel Gompers

#12. All the time our union was progressing very nicely. There were lectures to make us understand what trades unionism is and our real position in the labor movement.

Rose Schneiderman

#13. It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor.

Frances Wright

#14. Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing.

Rose Schneiderman

#15. The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

Simone Weil

#16. 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

#17. The unions claim the deck is stacked against them when it comes to labor laws, but the truth is many private and public sector workers are forced to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, yet they have little say in how the unions spend their money.

Linda Chavez

#18. The so-called second New Deal of 1935 - including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor - represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive government approach to the collapse of national prosperity.

Robert Dallek

#19. If we take back the labor unions, the legitimate businesses, eventually they become just another street gang. Spiritually, psychologically, they've always been just a street gang.

Rudy Giuliani

#20. You can't do it unless you organize.

Samuel Gompers

#21. In my college years, I worked as a union labor organizer. I was just one of the many workers trying to do my part to help the community.

Jimmy Smits

#22. And what is liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, or labor, or trade?

Frederic Bastiat

#23. Labor must work harder to attract and retain members. The party should be cheaper to join with discounted rates available for union members as well as for students, pensioners, and people out of work.

Bill Shorten

#24. I come from labor country. My mom was a teacher and was very involved in the teachers' union.

John Wells

#25. Today I send this message to every emerging global corporation: "justice; family, community, and union" are the same in every language and, wherever you go and whatever you do, a new global labor movement is coming to find you.

Andy Stern

#26. My parents were both union members, and I grew up hearing how important it was to empower workers and have fair labor practices.

Hilda Solis

#27. 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

#28. Your dad's not dead." I winced. "In fact, isn't he some kind of big-shot union labor guy?" He nodded. "Yup. That's who they called. Dad confirmed he died this morning.

KevaD

#29. In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining ... . We demand this fraud be stopped.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#30. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

Barack Obama

#31. I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

Chris Hayes

#32. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.'

David T. Hardy

#33. I only subpoena folks for jury duty that I know will be fair...

Paul Henry Abram