Industrial Conflict Quotes

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.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

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

There is nothing a worker resents more than to see some man taking his job. A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble.

As long as Detroit [the auto companies] was making money, it was always easy for us to accept union demands and recoup them later in the form of price increases. The alternative was to take a strike and risk ruining the company.

It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

Industrial contests take on all the attitudes and psychology of war, and both parties do many things that they should never dream of doing in times of peace…. all parties in interest must be judged from that standpoint.

Industrial wars due to the arrogance and the blindness of the labor unions are a much greater menace to the United States today than foreign wars.

My dad was a miner at South Kirkby colliery. He went on strike but he didn't go to the picket line, he just put his feet up and got in my mum's way.

Economic disputes are rarely the real cause of a strike. We do not have a strike because negotiations break down; negotiations break down because the situation is a strike situation.

The strike is the weapon of the industrial jungle.

The strikebreaker is the hero of American industry.

When rich men are thus brought to regard themselves as trustees, and poor men learn to be industrious, economical, temperate, self-denying, and diligent in the acquisition of knowledge, then the deplorable strife between capital and labor, tending to destroy their fundamental, necessary, and irrefragable harmony will cease, and the world will no longer be afflicted with such unnatural industrial conflicts as we have seen during the past century...

The real conflict, if any exists, is between two industrial systems.