Workers Union Quotes

#1. My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union.

Michael Leunig

#2. I was an organizer in the Food, Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union down in North Carolina.

Al Lewis

#3. The workers aren't going to stop struggling. They're going to struggle to have a union and they have the right to have it. The police repression and the grower indifference to the workers' demands for recognition cannot go unheard so we're going to keep on struggling until we get that recognition.

Cesar Chavez

#4. The important role of union organizations must be admitted: their object is the representation of the various categories of workers, their lawful collaboration in the economic advance of society, and the development of the sense of their responsibility for the realization of the common good.

Pope Paul VI

#5. My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California, where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

Hilda Solis

#6. Now workers should have the right to join unions. But unions should not be forced upon workers. And unions should not have the power to take money our of their members' paychecks to buy the support of politicians that are favored by the union bosses.

Mitt Romney

#7. I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#8. 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

#9. Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.

Michael Parenti

#10. 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

#11. As more workers lose manufacturing jobs as companies cut back, some are being forced into lower-paying retail jobs. But they still have union cards in their wallets.

Bill Dedman

#12. I am very pro-union and very anti-authority by nature, so by showing the housekeepers and valets, I was being loyal to those people - those workers. I'm glad that the service industry unionized.

Jacob Tomsky

#13. 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

#14. The AFL-CIO is a structure that divides workers' strength by allowing each union to organize in any industry, then bargain on its own, even when workers share a common employer.

Andy Stern

#15. Can a conservative work safely and soundly in a union environment - in a shop filled with union workers, activists, voters and life-long supporters of the Democrat Party? You betcha.

Joe Wurzelbacher

#16. I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#17. 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

#18. Any union that can't accept workers choosing their own representatives through universal franchise is finished.

Jacques Delors

#19. 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

#20. The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are "protected". The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It's spread widely. There are people that don't have jobs because of tariffs but they don't know it.

Milton Friedman

#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. We can bring to earth a new world from the ashes of the old because our union transforms us the powerless into the powerful. And I ask you to join together in using all that power-all that strength to make the dreams of all workers and communities around the world come true.

Andy Stern

#23. 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

#24. The decision to join or not join a service union, political party or other organization should be left up to the individual. No such organization has the right to take money out of the pockets of state workers without their proper consent.

Matt Blunt

#25. It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers.

Alexandra Kollontai

#26. 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

#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. 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

#29. In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.

Robert Reich

#30. But children are our future!' Yes, but does that not also mean that we are their past? I don't understand why we're helping them. You don't see union factory workers throwing a benefit for robots.

Stephen Colbert

#31. Because of GLHR's crusades ... we're beginning to learn the awful truth about workers around the world who are slaving away their lives in sweatshops, who are denied the right to join or form a union in order to fight back and provide a better life for their families.

John Sweeney

#32. We must have more union members in this country to fight the political and business forces that are undermining workers in this country. The AFL-CIO has chosen the opposite approach by planning to throw even more money at politicians.

James P. Hoffa

#33. In the past we couldn't talk to non-union workers. Now we can at least talk to non-union workers so we'll be mobilizing them and educating them not for just six or eight months before an election, but we'll be doing it year-round.

Richard Trumka