Cesar Chavez Quotes

The road to social justice for the farm worker is the road of unionization. Our cause, our strike against table grapes and our international boycott are all founded upon our deep conviction that the form of collective self-help, which is unionization, holds far more hope for the farm worker than any other single approach, whether public or private. This conviction is what brings spirit, high hope and optimism to everything we do.

And the success of the union movement, historically, has always been to benefit all working men and women - not just people who belong to the union.

I will never apologize for standing up for my fellow Teamsters and all American workers.

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?

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.

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.

I think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.

The labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.

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

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.

I'm a passionate trade unionist.

We must have more union members in this country to fight the political and business forces that are undermining workers in this country. The AFL-CIO has chosen the opposite approach by planning to throw even more money at politicians.

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

The labor movement has lifted more people out of poverty than all the programs in the country.

Mitchell is only a common coal miner who has worked with his hands for 15 years, and is now a labor agitator. Any negotiations with him would unduly recognize a mere rabble-rouser..

Before there were unions, there was no middle class.

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.

The labor movement is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.

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

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

I'm pro Union.

I think we will see a united labor movement again. When workers unite they're stronger. The same goes for unions.

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.