Quotes about worker
page 4

Alfred P. Sloan photo
Joe Higgins photo

“This is a challenge to the entire trade union movement in Ireland - a declaration of war on the wages and working conditions of all workers.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

On the outsourcing of jobs by Irish Ferries in November 2005. Irish Independent http://www.independent.ie/national-news/troubled-waters-for-taoiseach-as-wave-of-job-cuts-begins-232717.html

Parker Palmer photo
Francis Escudero photo

“The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 4; as cited in: Melanie Feinberg (2007) "Beyond information retrieval"

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo
Ann Chiang photo
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Mikhail Kalinin photo
Ba Jin photo
Janeane Garofalo photo

“To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

Majority Report, June 3, 2005 broadcast
Majority Report

Leo Tolstoy photo
Manuel Castells photo

“The e-economy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 90

Allen C. Guelzo photo
Lou Barletta photo
David Harvey photo

“workers then have a strong stake in the preservation of the very system that exploits them because the destruction of that system entails the destruction of their savings.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 9, Money, Credit And Finance, p. 263

“Fine Art then, records by idealised imitation the glorious works of good men, whilst it holds those of bad men up to our abhorrence — it gives to posterity their images, either on the tinted canvass or the sculptured marble — it imitates the beautiful effects of nature as seen in the glowing landscape or the rising storm, and perpetuates the appearance of those beauteous gems of the seasons — flowers and fruits, which, though fading whilst the painter catches their tints, yet live after decay by and through his genius.
Industrial Art, on the contrary, aims at the embellishment of the works of man, by and through that power which is given to the artist for the investigation of the beautiful in nature; and in transferring it to the loom, the printing machine, the potter's wheel, or the metal worker's mould, he reproduces nature in a new form, adapting it to his purpose by an intelligence arising out of his knowledge as an artist and as a workman. In short, the adaptation of the natural type to a new material compels him to reproduce, almost create, as well as imitate — invent as well as copy”

design as well as draw!
George Wallis. " Art Education for the people. No IV. The principles of Fine Art as Applied to Industrial Purposes http://books.google.com/books?id=l55GAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA231." In: People's & Howitt's Journal: Of Literature, Art, and Popular Progress, Vol. 3. John Saunders ed. 1847, p. 231.

Vladimir Lenin photo
Rob Ford photo

“Those Oriental people work like dogs. They work their hearts out. They are workers non-stop. They sleep beside their machines. That's why they're successful in life. I went to Seoul, South Korea, I went to Taipei, Taiwan. I went to Tokyo, Japan. That's why these people are so hard workers (sic). I'm telling you, the Oriental people, they're slowly taking over.”

Rob Ford (1969–2016) Canadian politician, 64th Mayor of Toronto

Remarks at a council meeting 14 March 2008 http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/news/local/article/21463--asian-protestors-stage-city-hall-sit-in-over-rob-ford-s-oriental-comments
2000s, 2008

Hans Fritzsche photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

"I cannot speak to the authenticity of the quotation ... attributed to Hitler in the very many Web postings at which it is found, and without devoting far more research time than it warrants." - Ken Leford http://thepragmaticprogressive.blogspot.com/2011/03/hitler-and-unions.html.
Disputed

Thomas Carlyle photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“You of course appreciate that this industry of ours the automotive industry is today the greatest in the world. Three or four years ago it passed, in volume, steel and steel products, the next largest industry. This means, expressed otherwise, that upon its prosperity depends the prosperity of many millions of our citizens and the degree to which it has become stabilized in turn has a tremendous influence on the stabilization of industry as a whole, and therefore on the prosperity and happiness of still many more of our citizens. Directly and indirectly, this industry distributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to those who are connected with it, in one way or another, as workers. It also distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in the aggregate to those who have invested in its securities. The purchasing power of this total aggregation, as you must appreciate, is tremendous.
I believe that if you questioned many of your readers as to the present position of the automotive industry, they would tell you that it is growing by leaps and bounds. I believe further you would sense uncertainty as to what is going to happen in the industry when the so-called state of saturation is reached. I do not know whether you appreciate it or not, but the industry has not grown very much during the past three or four years. It is practically stabilized at the present time.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 331-2: Speech by President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., delivered to representatives of the automotive press at the Proving Ground on September 28, 1927.

Jayne Mansfield photo

“Mickey is a hard worker. He takes care of the house, looks after my animals, and satisfies me. What else can one expect of a man?”

Jayne Mansfield (1933–1967) American actress, singer, model

On her second husband, Mickey Hargitay
Here They Are Jayne Mansfield (1992)

Henry David Thoreau photo

“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday

“Yet even here all these peoples have remained rooted in their sacred homelands for centuries. Though oppressed and colonized by outsiders, they have never been expelled en masse, and so the theme of restoration to the homeland has played little part in the conceptions of these peoples. There are, however, two peoples, apart from the Jews, for whom restoration of the homeland and commonwealth have been central: the Greeks and the Armenians, and together with the Jews, they constitute the archetypal Diaspora peoples, or what John Armstrong has called ‘mobilized diasporas° Unlike diasporas composed of recent mi migrant workers—Indians, Chinese and others in Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean— mobilized diasporas are of considerable antiquity, are generally polyglot and multi-skilled trading communities and have ancient, portable religious traditions. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians claimed an ancient homeland and kingdom, looked back nostalgically to a golden age or ages of great kings, saints, sages and poets, yearned to return to ancient capitals with sacred sites and buildings, took with them wherever they went their ancient scriptures, sacred scripts and separate liturgies, founded in every city congregations with churches, clergy and religious schools, traded across the Middle East and Europe using the networks of enclaves of their co-religionists to compete with other ethnic trading networks, and used their wealth, education and economic skills to offset their political powerlessness)”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

Antonio Negri photo
Rosa Luxemburg photo
Antonio Negri photo
Antonio Negri photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“To Bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democratss must go among all classes of the population, must dispatch units of their army in all directions”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section D, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Georges Sorel photo
Baltasar Gracián photo

“Those who want to look like hard workers give the impression that they aren't up to their jobs.”

Todos los que hazen del hazendado en el empleo dan indicio de que no lo merecían.
Maxim 106 (p. 59)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Cesar Chavez photo

“Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across ad dry plain. Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farm workers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done. The time has come for the liberation of the poor farm worker.
History is on our side. May the strike go on! Viva la causa!”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

A similar statement (perhaps used in a later declaration) has been quoted at the UFW site http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/09.html: "Across the San Joaquin valley, across California, across the entire nation, wherever there are injustices against men and women and children who work in the fields — there you will see our flags — with the black eagle with the white and red background, flying. Our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain."
The Plan of Delano (1965)

Fu Kun-chi photo
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo

“Idealists, workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine, of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Quote of Filippo Marinetti, in his review 'Poesia' 1905; as cited in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 78
1900's

Patrick Buchanan photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Janet Yellen photo
Rein Vihalemm photo

“The most essential example of the theory of self-organisation in chemistry is the theory of non-linear, non-equilibrium thermodynamics of chemical reactions presented by Prigogine and his co-workers.”

Rein Vihalemm (1938–2015) Estonian philosopher of chemistry

Source: Chemistry as an Interesting Subject for the Philosophy of Science, 2001, p. 195

Friedrich Engels photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Simone de Beauvoir photo
Wilbur Ross photo

“I am not anti-trade. I am pro-trade, but I am pro-sensible trade, not trade that is to the disadvantage of the American worker and to the American manufacturing community.”

Wilbur Ross (1937) 39th and current United States Secretary of Commerce

U.S. Commerce nominee Ross says NAFTA is Trump's first trade priority https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/r-us-commerce-nominee-ross-says-nafta-is-trumps-first-trade-priority-2017-1-1001675930 (January 18, 2017)

Lane Kirkland photo
Floyd Dell photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo

“The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker.”

Rayner Heppenstall (1911–1981) British writer

Heppenstall, Rayner. Goodman, Jonathan (ed.). The Master Eccentric: The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall, 1969-1981. London: Allison & Busby. 1986. pg. 21. ISBN 0-85031-536-0

Mario Savio photo
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo

“… that new spirit which is passing from municipal into Imperial politics, which aims more at the improvement of the lot of the worker and the toiler than at those great constitutional effects in which past Parliaments have taken as their pride… It is all very well to make great speeches and to win great divisions. It is well to speak with authority in the councils of the world and to see your navies riding on every sea, and to see your flag on every shore. That is well, but it is not all. I am certain that there is a party in this country not named as yet that is disconnected with any existing political organization, a party which is inclined to say, "A plague on both your Houses, a plague on all your parties, a plague on all your politics, a plague on your ending discussions which yield so little fruit." (Cheers.) "Have done with this unending talk and come down and do something for the people." It is this spirit which animates, as I believe, the great masses of our artisans, the great masses of our working clergy, the great masses of those who work for and with the poor, and who for the want of a better word I am compelled to call by the bastard term of philanthropists.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Speech to a meeting at St James's Hall on behalf of the Progressive majority in the London County Council (21 March 1894), reported in The Times (22 March 1894), p. 7.

Tammy Smith photo
Louis Brandeis photo
Jeremy Rifkin photo
Ralph Nader photo
Charles Dupin photo
Alexander Acosta photo

“I am deeply grateful and honored for the opportunity to serve my country. I thank the President and his staff for their confidence in me and I am eager to work tirelessly on behalf of the American worker”

Alexander Acosta (1969) 27th and current United States Secretary of Labor

President Donald J. Trump Nominates R. Alexander Acosta to be Secretary of Labor https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/16/president-donald-j-trump-nominates-r-alexander-acosta-be-secretary-labor

Vladimir Lenin photo

“Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 38–41.
Collected Works

Cesar Chavez photo
Antonio Negri photo

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Vladimir Lenin photo

“Marx said that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lies between capitalism and communism. The more the proletariat presses the bourgeoisie, the more furiously they will resist. We know what vengeance was wreaked on the workers in France in 1848. And when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Speech to the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission Staff (7 November 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 169-70 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/nov/07b.htm
1910s

William Burges photo

“Nothing is more perishable than worn-out apparel, yet, thanks to documentary evidence, to the custom of burying people of high rank in their robes, and to the practice of wrapping up relics of saints in pieces of precious stuffs, we are enabled to form a veiy good idea of what these stuffs were like and where they came from. In the first instance they appear to have come from Byzantium, and from the East generally; but the manufacture afterwards extended to Sicily, and received great impetus at the Norman conquest of that island; Roger I. even transplanting Greek workmen from the towns sacked by his army, and settling them in Sicily. Of course many of the workers would be Mohammedans, and the old patterns, perhaps with the addition of sundry animals, would still continue in use; hence the frequency of Arabic inscriptions in the borders, the Cufic character being one of the most ornamental ever used. In the Hotel de Clu^ny at Paris are preserved the remains of the vestments of a bishop of Bayonne, found when his sepulchre was opened in 1853, the date of the entombment being the twelfth century. Some of these remains are cloth of gold, but the most remarkable is a very deep border ornamented with blue Cufic letters on a gold ground; the letters are fimbriated with white, and from them issue delicate red scrolls, which end in Arabic sort of flowers: this tissue probably is pure Eastern work. On the contrary, the coronation robes of the German emperors, although of an Eastern pattern, bear inscriptions which tell us very clearly where they were manufactured: thus the Cufic characters on the cope inform us that it was made in the city of Palermo in the year 1133, while the tunic has the date of 1181, but then the inscription is in the Latin language. The practice of putting Cufic inscriptions on precious stuffs was not confined to the Eastern and Sicilian manufactures; in process of time other Italian cities took up the art, and, either because it was the fashion, or because they wished to pass off" their own work as Sicilian or Eastern manufacture, imitations of Arabic characters are continually met with, both on the few examples that have come down to us of the stuffs themselves, or on painted statues or sculptured effigies. These are the inscriptions which used to be the despair of antiquaries, who vainly searched out their meaning until it was discovered that they had no meaning at all, and that they were mere ornaments. Sometimes the inscriptions appear to be imitations of the Greek, and sometimes even of the Hebrew. The celebrated ciborium of Limoges work in the Louvre, known as the work of Magister G. Alpais, bears an ornament around its rim which a French antiquary has discovered to be nothing more than the upper part of a Cufic word repeated and made into a decoration.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Quote was introduced with the phrase:
In the lecture on the weaver's art, we are reminded of the superiority of Indian muslins and Chinese and Persian carpets, and the gorgeous costumes of the middle ages are contrasted with our own dark ungraceful garments. The Cufic inscriptions that have so perplexed antiquaries, were introduced with the rich Eastern stuffs so much sought after by the wealthy class, and though, as Mr. Burges observes
Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 85; Cited in: " Belles Lettres http://books.google.com/books?id=0EegAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA143" in: The Westminster Review, Vol. 84-85. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1865. p. 143

Frances Kellor photo

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Stanley Knowles photo

“Workers do not try to prevent employers from making contributions to political parties the workers do not support.”

Stanley Knowles (1908–1997) Canadian politician

Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 9, Is Your Criticism Here?, p. 117

Arthur Scargill photo
Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood photo
Roger Nash Baldwin photo
Rensis Likert photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Mick Mulvaney photo
Narendra Modi photo
Ernest Mandel photo
Tomáš Baťa photo
Ralph Chaplin photo
Roger Nash Baldwin photo
Lee Kuan Yew photo
Eugene V. Debs photo
Jacques Barzun photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Fidel Castro photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo

“The issue was to wage a struggle against the war, against coalescence with the liberal bourgeoisie, and for the power of the workers' councils, the Soviets.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo

“A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Message to Congress on establishing minimum wages and maximum hours (1937)

Narendra Modi photo

“I will never let down the faith you have shown in the BJP, the words of our workers and me. The rivals were busy mudslinging but the people of India have said that the answer to their problems is vaikaas”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

development
2014, "Election results 2014 LIVE: 'The era of divisive politics is over', says Modi in Ahmedabad", 2014

Cesar Chavez photo
Germaine Greer photo
Donald J. Trump photo