Quotes About The Labor Movement

#1. [The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves ...

Samuel Gompers

#2. The labor movement is our brother's keeper! The labor movement is our sister's keeper!

Thomas Perez

#3. The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back.

Noam Chomsky

#4. 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

#5. The labor movement is people. Our unions have brought millions of men and women together, made them members one of another, and given them common tools for common goals. Their goals are goals for all America - and their enemies are the enemies for progress. The two cannot be separated.

John F. Kennedy

#6. Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

Angela Davis

#7. Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

Angela Davis

#8. They's making it worse, the labor movement got the mafia curse.

Frank Zappa

#9. I would say the issue for the labor movement in the United States is not structural ... there is no correlation between the success of workers and how the labor movement is structured.

Andy Stern

#10. To me, the labor movement was never just a way of getting higher wages. What appealed to me was the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship. You wanted the girl or the man who worked beside you to be treated just as well as you were, and an injury to one was the concern of all.

Rose Schneiderman

#11. The labor movement is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.

John L. Lewis

#12. 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.

A. Philip Randolph

#13. The origin of the labor movement lies in self-defense ...

Mary Ritter Beard

#14. So May 4th in the labor movement has always been an important date.

William Kunstler

#15. In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was.

John Lennon

#16. The labor movement must be destroyed.

Karl Rove

#17. The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

Wendell Phillips

#18. 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

#19. My parents had been involved in the labor movement; if we'd grown up in the city, we would have been red-diaper babies.

Holly Near

#20. The labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#21. The history of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land. America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life. We ought to be proud of it!

Hubert H. Humphrey

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#26. I have been very interested in labor movement. If I could have wished another life, I would have loved to be a pioneer woman in the beginning of labor movement.

Astrid Lindgren

#27. I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population.

Paul Robeson

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.

Gloria Steinem

#31. Make no mistake about it! There is an organized movement against organized labor and it's called the Bush Administration.

Edward Kennedy

#32. What my Republican colleagues often don't understand is that labor is a human-rights issue. I have to remind them Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement brought down the Communist bloc.

Chris Smith

#33. Before the war there were many who were more or less ignorant of the international labor movement but who nevertheless turned to it for salvation when the threat of war arose. They hoped that the workers would never permit a war.

Hjalmar Branting

#34. 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

#35. The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

Andy Stern

#36. I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

Grace Lee Boggs

#37. I think we will see a united labor movement again. When workers unite they're stronger. The same goes for unions.

John Sweeney