Trade Union Quotes

#1. I fear that within 10 years gays, trade union activists and left wing politicians will be led off to the gas chambers.

Ken Livingstone

#2. In other words, when women acquire critical skills and starting weighing their options they soon wise up to the fact that they're not getting enough recompense for their labors. In trade union terms, you'd call it a production slowdown ...

Meghan Daum

#3. Had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins

George Orwell

#4. As capital becomes more and more organised, it tends to pull together all its different strands, bringing a statist element to the enterprise, a bourgeois element to the trade-union bureaucracy, and a social element to public administration.

Anonymous

#5. I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.

Cornel West

#6. Having spent a number of my younger years with trade-union parents attending NUT annual conferences, I feel comfortable with an agenda in my hand and a procedural format for debate.

Saffron Burrows

#7. At Leeds the idea of an international labour organization appeared in a trade-union text which also drew attention to the danger to the working classes inherent in the existence of international capitalist competition.

Leon Jouhaux

#8. The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

Ernest Mandel

#9. The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

Vladimir Lenin

#10. Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

Angela Davis

#11. I think the business community is smart enough to realise that just having a trade union is not enough. They are smart enough to know they need to be part of a union that has political and financial power.

Marjorie Scardino

#12. Whether he'll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who'll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he'll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-union or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America. But,

Richard Wright

#13. People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement

Michael Foot

#14. GLHR ... has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion - dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century.

Naomi Klein

#15. The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

Arthur Scargill

#16. I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.

Bob Gunton

#17. We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick ... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

Edward Heath

#18. The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers ... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

Samuel Gompers

#19. There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.

Susan George

#20. I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.

Saffron Burrows

#21. On completion of my military service, I went back to the factory and to the trade union.

Leon Jouhaux

#22. When I came back to India after Harvard Business School, I started as a lawyer and as a trade union leader.

P. Chidambaram

#23. All the evidence shows very clearly that if you are a member of a trade union you are likely to get better pay, more equal pay, better health and safety, more chance to get training, more chance to have conditions of work that help if you have caring responsibilities ... the list goes on!

Frances O'Grady

#24. No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

George Bernard Shaw

#25. The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

Henry George

#26. Just as democratic government cannot be condemned because of errors and even crimes committed by men democratically elected, so trade-unionism must not be condemned because of errors or crimes of occasional trade-union leaders.

Theodore Roosevelt

#27. Individual guarantees stated in writing in the constitution are of no use to a nation if it is not the people, but a third party, whether government or trade-union, that fixes prices and wages

Faustino Ballve

#28. Marx and other social critics quipped, Western governments were becoming a capitalist trade union.

Yuval Noah Harari

#29. There is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn't have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.

Bob Hawke

#30. My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.

Jez Butterworth

#31. Never has a strong, responsible trade union movement been so needed. With austerity policies biting hard and with no evidence that they are working, people at work need the TUC to speak up for them now more than ever.

Frances O'Grady

#32. The hellish instruments of war must be smoked out while there is still peace. The Trade Union Movement must be compelled not to allow their old resolutions to fade in the files.

Carl Von Ossietzky

#33. You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament.

Arthur Scargill

#34. Social Democratic and trade union organs have approved of the illegal invasion of Belgium, of the massacre of suspected guerrillas, as well as their wives and children, as well as the destruction of their homes in various towns and districts.

Clara Zetkin

#35. By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights the right to belong to a free trade union.

Ronald Reagan

#36. The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure.

Zac Goldsmith

#37. I think it is one of the fundamentals, not only of the European Union but also of free trade, that competition is fair.

Margrethe Vestager

#38. The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

Fareed Zakaria

#39. The crisis in Ukraine is all the European Union's fault. Its leaders negotiated a trade deal with Ukraine, which essentially blackmailed the country to choose between Europe and Russia,

Marine Le Pen

#40. To the best of my knowledge, when I became national secretary and, indeed, Victorian secretary, the - my predecessors in the union had detected wrong activities, activities which aren't in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism.

Bill Shorten

#41. The countries that have risen and separated out as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are, on the whole, following freer economic policies. Most of these states have freer government and less restrictions on trade.

Milton Friedman

#42. 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

#43. Just as the UK should withdraw from the EU and go back to the original European Economic Area principles of engagement with the continent, so also should it establish a free trade Commonwealth Market.

Przemek Skwirczynski

#44. As much as I value an union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agreed to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union.

George Mason

#45. I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#46. The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

Nina Easton

#47. Sam Parks was simply a paid agent for his union, receiving the same salary as an ordinary workman in his trade. In reality, Baker tracked him "riding about in his cab, wearing diamonds, appearing on the street with his blooded bulldog, supporting his fast horses, 'treating' his friends.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#48. Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.

Frank Chodorov

#49. The U.K. is outward-looking, trade-oriented, growth-oriented, and we do not have enough of that storyline, that tradition, that culture within the European Union.

Mark Rutte

#50. Both France and Britain are supportive of India's bid for a broad-based agreement on trade and investment with the European Union.

Salman Khurshid