Quotes About Unions

#1. People have to be reminded that unions played a very historic role in our economy.

Hilda Solis

#2. Victorian feminists made the mistake of making membership of the sisterhood conditional on signing up to a particular policy agenda. Marxist feminists made a similar mistake of saying, 'You can't be a real feminist unless you join with miners, the unions, the vegans.'

Naomi Wolf

#3. 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

#4. When the unions were fighting me 45 years ago, they could never beat me.

Harry Triguboff

#5. Some people called me a fascist. That's mostly over, but there will be more attacks from the unions.

Luis Fortuno

#6. There is nothing that says unions have a God-given right to be there. We have to work at it and make ourselves relevant to every section of the workforce.

Frances O'Grady

#7. Do you realize that $150 billion of our tax money is given to the corporations, unions and wealthy people for tax breaks, special subsidies and special regulations? That money would be available for health and education and building bridges.

Doris "Granny D" Haddock

#8. Labor unions should study and read the Bible instead of asking for more money. When people get right with God, they are better workers.

Jerry Falwell

#9. And although in many cases these unions proved happy enough, sailors being excellent husbands, often away and handy about the house when ashore, it did make for a curious gathering when the spouses were invited to a ball.

Patrick O'Brian

#10. I make a lot of money. I can take a pay cut. All my friends are taking pay cuts that are in the unions, that are - that are farming in Alabama or whatever it is. I can surely take a pay cut, too, not cutting down my show or - or the people that work for me, I can take a pay cut.

Kid Rock

#11. I respect the state workers and I respect their unions, but we simply can't afford to pay benefits and pensions that are out of line with economic reality.

Andrew Cuomo

#12. I think when everything is finally considered, I'll have a lot of support
strong support
not only from labor unions but from working people.

Dick Gephardt

#13. Speaking as a human being, not as a businessman - the unions are great. The unions are great for the working people because they protect you, but I didn't see them that way as a young man. First of all, the papers would connect them with thee communists - labor unions were communists.

Jack Kirby

#14. This constitution recognises the need for social dialogue involving labour and management; it involves trade unions in the decision-making process; it has a social vision founded on social dialogue.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin

#15. We need to end the government monopoly in education by transferring power from bureaucracies and unions to families. The era of defining public education as allegiance to centralized school districts must end.

Jeb Bush

#16. Many people do not realize that where unions have bargaining rights employers cannot raise wages or improve benefit plans any more than they can reduce them without of the consent of the union.

Charles E. Wilson

#17. Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked
with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy.

Saul Alinsky

#18. What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

Lech Walesa

#19. The dissolution of the trade unions was in the air then.

Fritz Sauckel

#20. These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.

Alain Badiou

#21. The main difference lies in wage levels, which is because our workers are not yet as well trained as in other countries. We are a poor country. This is why we must accept the conditions that prevail in international markets. But our trade unions do represent the rights of workers.

Nguyen Minh Triet

#22. I do believe that not just the churches but strong communities, strong trade unions, strong families can make a difference in terms of producing persons much more virtuous than what one usually finds in a gangster culture.

Cornel West

#23. Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.

Sarah Lacy

#24. So are the early unions of an unfixed Marriage: watchful and observant, jealous and busy, inquisitive and careful, and apt to take alarm at every unkind word. For infirmities do not manifest themselves in the first Scenes, but in the succession of a long Society.

Jeremy Taylor

#25. Unions should not be lapdogs to a political party, they should be watchdogs for their members' interests.

Andy Stern

#26. Hey, I'm a former union president myself and also an attorney that represented a lot of unions.

Stephen F. Lynch

#27. The trade unions and the Labour Party ... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

Arthur Scargill

#28. 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

#29. I want my country to be trusted. I don't want anybody running for president telling the unions what they want to hear at the expense of the credibility of the United States.

Brian Williams

#30. The time has come to tell the truth about the corruption of the government employee unions in this country.

Newt Gingrich

#31. 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

#32. We - again, the, the, the, the bastardization and the demonization over the last few years of teachers and of unions and of collective bargaining, that is not the answer.

Tavis Smiley

#33. Today's unions are less Mobbed-up than those of yesteryear to be sure, but they're hardly above tactics that would be considered intimidating and coercive.

Jonah Goldberg

#34. We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

Grover Norquist

#35. Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

Tony Kushner

#36. We would be foolish and silly not to unite with people in the public health sector, the environmental community, [and] unions, to try to challenge corporate agriculture.

Wayne Pacelle

#37. The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

Walter Lippmann

#38. The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted
or rather tend to be corrupted
by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

Vladimir Lenin

#39. Just as there can be little doubt that labor unions are a significant political force, neither can there be much question that this political force is a by-product of the purely industrial activities that unions regard as their major function.

Mancur Olson

#40. Now, I learned soon enough, that among the three, two don't trust the third one - the third one is the government. Both industry and unions feel the government is a talking organization and a spending organization.

Shimon Peres

#41. I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

John Mackey

#42. I would not go so far as to say that the French trade unions attached greater importance to the struggle for peace than the others did; but they certainly seemed to take it more to heart.

Leon Jouhaux

#43. The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party.

Eli Broad

#44. Public-opinion polls show that Americans split about evenly on civil unions. But when the words 'gay marriage' are presented, they break 3-to-1 against it.

Dick Morris

#45. It is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic nation that it have free and independent labor unions.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#46. Unions do have a proper role in negotiating for employees and advising employees, but they have to engage with the employer.

Jim Ratcliffe

#47. People with banking experience haven't all flocked to the biggest banks; community banks and regional banks, along with smaller trading houses and credit unions, have some very talented people.

Elizabeth Warren

#48. Private unions, such as the UAW, is a choice between employees and employers. If that is what they want, then who am I to say you can't have it?

Joe Wurzelbacher

#49. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can't teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It's terrible.

Steve Jobs

#50. The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.

Grover Norquist

#51. I think business, government and unions have to work together, and the common enemies to the global economy. We're being beaten by the global economy, and we've got to unite together to win.

Stephen Pagliuca

#52. Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.

Edmund Phelps

#53. In this country, where workmen move about frequently and with facility, the unions suffer in their harmony and stability. It

William Graham Sumner

#54. Margaret Thatcher made tough decisions. She put people out of work and she stood up to labor unions and she did a lot of things that I did not like.

Harvey Weinstein

#55. Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.

A.C. Grayling

#56. If I were the president of the United States, I would make unions illegal. They no longer serve a functional purpose in democracy, in my view.

Kevin O'Leary

#57. Private sector labors unions continue to suffer losses in their membership while public sector and service unions grow.

Thomas E. Mann

#58. It is true that they paid much more attention to the trade unions because the trade unions were after all speaking for the rights and conditions of working men and women in their employment.

Barbara Castle

#59. The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.

Milton Friedman

#60. Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.

Aneurin Bevan

#61. The trade unions, far from being content with these declarations, established international liaisons and supported every policy based on pacification and understanding.

Leon Jouhaux

#62. A lot of unions are doing the same thing on the left that the NRA is doing on the right.

Eric Bolling

#63. Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

Andy Stern

#64. I've said consistently that no employer ever really accepts a union. They tolerate the unions. The very minute they can get a pool of unemployment they'll challenge the unions and try to get back what they call managements prerogatives, meaning hire, fire, pay what you want.

Jimmy Hoffa

#65. I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#66. The clash between capital and labour, between those seeking to maximise profit and those with only their toil to sell, was the driving force for the creation of the trade unions in the 19th century.

David Blunkett

#67. Large corporations and unions know the power of being big enough to bargain for better rates.

Greg Walden

#68. Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her re-unions.

Milan Kundera

#69. Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note.

Charles Duhigg

#70. I think it is just stupid economics for a government to approach economic management from a strand of thinking regarding unions as enemies.

Bob Hawke

#71. The short-term problems are economic - royalties, unions, irresponsible management. The long-term problems are artistic, and they started 40 years ago with the advent of television and the upgrading of films.

Emanuel Azenberg

#72. Ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the children of the man with whom a particular woman cohabited first.

Winston S. Churchill

#73. So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers' unions, do not be surprised to see American students continuing to score lower on international tests than students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do.

Thomas Sowell

#74. When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Langston Hughes

#75. Instead of basic roads and bridges, infrastructure spending will go to bloated unions overseeing pie-in-the-sky construction projects like the $30 billion-plus high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which California officials fully expect to be funded.

Michelle Malkin

#76. Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.

Ronald Reagan

#77. The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.

Robert Reich

#78. Don't be sad about the goodbyes! Because in many farewells, better unions are hidden!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#79. The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.

P. J. O'Rourke

#80. Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.

Sarah Lacy

#81. Obama's Democrats have become the part of no. Real cuts to federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.

Charles Krauthammer

#82. The unions may continue to decline, but if they do, it'll be their fault.

Jacques Delors

#83. The strategy we need to pursue is one of recovering our time - to push back on our hours of work. We need to form a new alliance between feminist groups, labor unions, child advocates, progressive corporations, and the federal government insofar as it's willing to pursue a family-friendly agenda.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#84. Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.

Richard Rorty

#85. I have to admit that many of the relationships I write about are destructive, but that's the yin to the yang of a good relationship. Maybe you have to experience the terrible ones to appreciate the good unions!

Caroline Leavitt

#86. Gay unions, what is that about? I haven't been invited to any ceremonies, and I wouldn't go anyway. The idea that gay people have to mimic what obviously doesn't work for straight people any more ... I think is a bit tragic. I am looking forward to gay divorces.

Boy George

#87. Lawmakers in both political parties have often acceded to unions' requests to avoid political confrontations or to curry favor. They have pushed difficult choices into the future.

Charles Duhigg

#88. The need to connect with one another intimately is what makes and keeps us human. The challenge throughout life is to find the courage to reach out to potential partners when our primary relationship ends and to recharge our tried-and-true unions when their sizzle starts to fizzle.

Joyce Brothers

#89. In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

James Surowiecki

#90. Not only has the number of government employees multiplied in recent decades, but the rise of government unions further stacks the political odds against private citizens.

James Bovard

#91. The Government as Substitute Husband did for women what labor unions still have not accomplished for men. And men pay dues for labor unions; the taxpayer pays the dues for feminism. Feminism and government soon become taxpayer-supported women's unions.

Warren Farrell

#92. So long as procreation stems from parents of the same race, appearance and lineage are typically congruent. Interracial unions give rise to added complexity. Interracial amalgamation will produce some individuals whose features diverge from those commonly ascribed to the races of their ancestors.

Randall Kennedy

#93. Unions, though they may for a time be able to secure an increase in money wages for their members, partly at the expense of employers and more at the expense of nonunionized workers, cannot, in the long-run and for the whole body of workers, increase real wages at all.

Henry Hazlitt

#94. The reason that the unions and the other stakeholders have not cut a deal with the automakers is because they believe the federal government is going to bail them out.

Tim Pawlenty

#95. Trade unions are a force for good - a force for a more equal society.

Jeremy Corbyn

#96. The unions need to be taken on. British Airways is massively over-staffed and has got to get its costs down ... The problem for [chief executive] Willie Walsh is that the board of BA has no spine, no balls and no vision.

Michael O'Leary

#97. I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

Steven Levitt

#98. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#99. Carl Icahn told me to stay away from airlines. In good times, the unions take away the profits, and in bad times, the cost of oil kills you.

Mian Muhammad Mansha

#100. My view is that you still, in order to win from the Labour perspective, have to have a strong alliance with business as well as the unions. You have got to be very much in the centre ground on things like public sector reform.

Tony Blair