Leo XIII Quotes

The denial by employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest, which have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce.

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina's wealth and power in their hands. So Peron and the government brought in an eight hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go .

The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions.

When wage controls and other legal restrictions on Canadian workers of the government's only answer to that country's deepening economic problems, the labor movement's response has to be fundamentally political.

We have reached the point where we must advise the miners … to either continue working under these unjust and tyrannical conditions or counsel a strike.

The history of all countries shows that, by its own efforts, the working class can develop only a trade-union consciousness—that is, the realization of the need of getting together in unions in order to fight employers and to demand from the government the passing of laws necessary for the workers.

Thank God we have a system of labor where there can be a strike.

Look at your [labor] strikes. They are proof that the men are desperate.

The Socialist Party emphatically rejects the proposal that in times of war, the workers should suspend their struggle for better conditions.

Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency.

Labor: a man coins himself into his labor,—turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all, and constitutions and governments exist for that,—to protect and insure it to the laborer.

What the working-class can do, when once they grow into a solidified organization, is to show the possessing class, through a sudden cessation of all work, that the whole social structure rests on them; that the possessions of the others are absolutely worthless to them without the workers' activity; that such protests, such strikes, are inherent in the system of property and will continually recur

The strike and the boycott, they have cost us much. What they have not paid us in wages, better working conditions, and new contracts, they have paid us in self-respect and human dignity

The labor movement was a reaction to capitalism.

In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.

Here's the dilemma of the modern age: There used to be actions that workers could take, in the form of a strike. But now, that's being pre-empted by lockouts. They don't even have that leverage to protect their jobs.

Each reform, therefore, improving the economical and political situation of the workers proves to be an arm that increases the energy with which the proletarian struggle of classes is fought.

I was a union member in my youth as well and I went on strike, and I don't think it solved anything. It only made the situation worse for everyone involved.

Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.

At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence.

Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.

Socialism appeals to better classes and has far more strength. Attack the state and you excite feelings of loyalty even among the disaffected classes; but attack the industrial system and appeal to the state, and you may have loyalty in your favor.