Boots Riley Quotes

No better strike leader than John N. Mitchell has ever emerged in any time of industrial strife.

I'm not anti-union.

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

Having spent a number of my younger years with trade-union parents attending NUT annual conferences, I feel comfortable with an agenda in my hand and a procedural format for debate.

We could see the Teamsters coming in from New Jersey, the AFL-CIO from Chicago. You could see all of the people being bused in.

I'm a lifelong believer in trade unionism.

After contract negotiations and organizing, playing an active role in the political process is one of a union's most important functions. Gains won at the bargaining table or through sacrifice on the picketline can be wiped out by politicians on the state or federal level.

The strike is the weapon of the industrial jungle.

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

The number of men out on strike exceeds that of any other industrial contest in the history of our country.

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.

It is essential that there be organization of labor…. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop.

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

Many people have mixed views about unions, but unions used to give people some measure of control at work. They gave them a social life and political representation in Washington, which doesn't really exist anymore.

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

I'm pro Union.

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.

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

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.

The dissolution of the trade unions was in the air then.

I am a proud trade unionist.

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.

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

The trade unions, far from being content with these declarations, established international liaisons and supported every policy based on pacification and understanding.