Dolores Huerta Quotes

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.

The right to organize is a fundamental right for American workers.

The origin of the labor movement lies in self-defense.

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.

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

The trade union, which originated under the European system, destroys liberty.

Many of those who helped to lay the foundations of the trade union movement were men who had been through the experience of Socialism and found their way to sounder policies.

Show me a country in which there are no strikes and I'll show you that country is which there is no liberty.

We back Solidarity [the Polish trade union], and bust our unions.

Unquestionably unions and their leaders are not always wise and fair any more than any other human beings. There are only two ways to bring about protection of the workers, however, legislation and unionization. So far the majority of the people in this country seem to favor unions as a more democratic and elastic method, though certain things must be dealt with by legislation.

There is no way whereby our labor movement may be assured sustained progress in determining its policies and its plans other than sincere democratic deliberation until a unanimous decision is reached. This may seem a cumbrous, slow method to the impatient, but the impatient are more concerned for immediate triumph than for the education of constructive development.

Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and unaccountable.

I am a huge believer in organized labor. Period. Full stop.

If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.

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.

Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth...

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

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

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.

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.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

By the mid-1950s, more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie.

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

The labor movement has failed to capture the support of the public at large.