Boots Riley Quotes

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

The working class owes all honor and respect to the first men who planted the standard of labor solidarity on the hostile frontier of unorganized industry.

I came from a working-class family. My dad was in a union. I never forgot what it was like to be a private.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

Everything is produced by the workers, and the minute they try to get something by their unions they meet all the opposition that can be mustered by those who now get what they produce.

Regardless of the degree of class consciousness of their members, the trade unions are, by their very nature, driven on to the revolutionary goal.

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

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

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

The task is before us. We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized. We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized by the masters….the labor unions of America are being broken up because there is not sufficient unified understanding, because there is not sufficient leadership to save them.

Universal economic evils afflicting the working class can be eradicated only by a universal working-class movement. Such a movement of the working class is impossible while separate craft and wage agreements are made favoring the employer against other crafts in the same industry, and while energies are wasted in fruitless jurisdictional struggles which serve only to further the personal aggrandizement of union officials.

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.

Trade unionism means the enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.

It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

My heart lies with the workers.

Unquestionably unions and their leaders are not always wise and fair any more than any other human beings.

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.

I stand with the working-class citizens.

I fight like a daggone wild man for labor 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 make films about working class people.

I'm a working-class person, working with class.

When the unions were fighting me 45 years ago, they could never beat me.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.