Quotes about worker
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Warren Farrell photo
Max Stirner photo
Benjamin J. Davis Jr. photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology" http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/the-glories-of-husseins-proctology/, WorldNetDaily.com, October 3, 2013.
2010s, 2013

Thomas Frank photo
Warren Farrell photo
John Holloway photo
A. James Gregor photo
Roger Nash Baldwin photo
James Traficant photo
Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Alain de Botton photo

“We need a robust but targeted military approach. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no war-monger. I opposed the Iraq war and worked for a decade as an Oxfam aid worker – but this isn’t Iraq. This is a humanitarian crisis.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Jo Cox: Syria is not Iraq – we must take action now http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/jo-cox-syria-is-not-iraq-we-must-take-action-now-1-7453039 (10 September 2015)

Mao Zedong photo

“Ours is a people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On the Correct Handling of Contradiction (1957)

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“The most important thing in my life, its leitmotif, has been the constant and close contacts with working people, with workers and peasants.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Sputnik : Digest (1967), p. 48

Tony Benn photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Herbert Morrison photo

“It is because I have confidence in the reasoned appeal the Socialist Party can make to all sections of the community – manual workers and black coats alike – that I have decided to go to East Lewisham, if I am selected, emphasizing by this action my conviction that the soundest socialist appeal is that which is most universal in its scope.”

Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) British Labour politician

The Times, 10 January 1945.
Morrison abandoned his safe seat in Hackney South for Lewisham East in the 1945 general election despite it being a Conservative-held seat that had never previously returned a Labour MP. The move paid off, and he was elected there.

Tjalling Koopmans photo
Upton Sinclair photo

“Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Desktop Regulatory State (2016), Chapter 2
The Desktop Regulatory State (2016)

Jim Morrison photo
Alistair Cooke photo

“He measured all his fellow workers by the test of professionalism, and a professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

About Humphrey Bogart
Six Men (1977)

Cesar Chavez photo
Abbie Hoffman photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“While we are mindful of the shocking fact that less than one-half of all non-white workers are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, we do not speak for Negro workers only. A living wage should be the right of all working Americans, and this is what we wish to urge upon our Congressmen and Senators as they now prepare to deal with this legislation.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Statement on minimum wage legislation (18 March 1966)], as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986)
1960s

Andrei Sakharov photo
Henry George photo

“No amount of force will break an egg-shell if exerted on one side alone. So capital could not squeeze labor as long as labor was free to natural opportunities, and in a world where these natural materials and opportunities were as free to all as is the air to us, there could be no difficulty in finding employment, no willing hands conjoined with hungry stomachs, no tendency of wages toward the minimum on which the worker could barely live. In such a world we would no more think of thanking anybody for furnishing us employment than we here think of thanking anybody for furnishing us with appetites.
That the Creator might have put us in the kind of world I have sought to imagine, as readily as in this kind of a world, I have no doubt. Why he has not done so may, however, I think, be seen. That kind of a world would be best for fools. This is the best for men who will use the intelligence with which they have been gifted. Of this, however, I shall speak hereafter. What I am now trying to do by asking my readers to endeavor to imagine a world in which natural opportunities were "as free as air," is to show that the barrier which prevents labor from freely using land is the nether millstone against which labor is ground, the true cause of the difficulties which are apparent through the whole industrial organization.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 13 : Unemployed Labor

Barbara Ehrenreich photo
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Ralph Nader photo
Georges Sorel photo

“All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers’ syndicates.”

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) French philosopher and sociologist

As quoted in Essays in Political Philosophy, Vidya Dhar Mahajan, Doaba House, Lahore, 1943 p. 41

John Zerzan photo
Yeh Kuang-shih photo
Joe Hill photo
Ba Jin photo
Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. photo
David Graeber photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Ernest Mandel photo
George W. Bush photo
George W. Bush photo
Zygmunt Vetulani photo
Charles Dupin photo
Eugene V. Debs photo
Rudy Giuliani photo

“I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was there guiding things. I was there bringing people there. But I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them.”

Rudy Giuliani (1944–2001) American businessperson and politician, former mayor of New York City

While campaigning in Cincinnati, as quoted in The New York Times (11 August 2007)

Antonio Negri photo
Wassily Leontief photo
Georges Sorel photo

“Lenin may be proud of what his comrades are doing; the Russian workers are acquiring immortal glory in attempting the realization of what hitherto had been only an abstract idea…..”

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) French philosopher and sociologist

“For Lenin,” Soviet Russia, Official Organ of The Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Vol. II, New York: NY, January-June 1920 (April 10, 1920), p. 356

Mitch Albom photo
L. Randall Wray photo
Fyodor Dan photo
Ted Nelson photo
Theodore Schultz photo

“Investment in human capital accounts for most of the impressive rise in the real earnings per worker.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

Source: "Investment in human capital," 1961, p. 1

Nate Diaz photo

“I'll wake up and I'll train the next day. It's been like that since I started. I think I train harder, harder than the hardest workers in the off-season.”

Nate Diaz (1985) American mixed martial artist

As quoted in "Nate Diaz discusses win over Conor McGregor" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg6NkqFPOyY (5 March 2016), UFC on FOX, FOX

Clement Attlee photo
Thomas Szasz photo
Fritz Sauckel photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
George W. Bush photo

“The enemy in Iraq believes America will run, that's why they're willing to kill innocent civilians, relief workers, coalition troops. America will never run. America will do what is necessary to make our country more secure.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Speech in Birmingham, Alabama, November 3, 2003 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031103-7.html http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70914FA35540C778CDDA80994DB404482
2000s, 2003

“The faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party, its conclusion, and the recent formation of the Workers Party have been in my own case, the unavoidable occasion for the review of my own theoretical and political beliefs. This review has shown me that by no stretching of terminology can I regard myself, or permit others to regard me, as a Marxist.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

As cited in: Marcel van der Linden (2007) Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 http://libcom.org/files/van_der_linden_western_marxism_and_soviet_union.pdf. p. 80
Burnham's Letter of Resignation, 1940

Osvaldo Pugliese photo
Gregory Benford photo

“They will do anything for the worker, except become one.”

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 5 (p. 46, concerning the peers)

Abd al-Karim Qasim photo
Charles Babbage photo

“It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 26 "Street Nuisances"
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

Stafford Cripps photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“The Budget, and the policy of the Budget, is the first conscious attempt on the part of the State to build up a better and a more scientific organization of society for the workers of this country.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 146-147
Early career years (1898–1929)

Friedrich Hayek photo
Anthony Giddens photo
Immanuel Wallerstein photo

“In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been.
It is also to Europe's credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: 'Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit… Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.'
The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.”

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) economic historian

Wallerstein (1974) The Modern World-System, vol. I, p. 233.

Antonio Negri photo
Eugene V. Debs photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Charles A. Beard photo
John the Evangelist photo

“So we ought to support such men, that we may be fellow workers in the truth.”

John the Evangelist (10–98) author of the Gospel of John; traditionally identified with John the Apostle of Jesus, John of Patmos (author o…

in 3 John 1:8 as quoted in www.ewtn.com http://www.ewtn.com/ewtn/bible/search_bible.asp#ixzz2yvDfbYUZ
Third Letter of John

Max Eastman photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realising that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries.”

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

"Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration", in Za Pravdu No. 22 (29 October 1913) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/oct/29.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24.
1910s

Patrick Buchanan photo
Rajiv Gandhi photo
George W. Bush photo
Alain de Botton photo
Henry Adams photo
Lillian Gilbreth photo
William Morris photo