labor advocacy Quotes

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.

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.

Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

You in the unions do not yet represent all of labor. But I hope some day you will, because I believe that it is through strength, through the fact that people who know what people need are working to make this country a better place for all people, that we will help the world to accept our leadership and understand that, under our form of government and through our way of life, we have something to offer them.

I had the good fortune to be thrown unexpectedly into something called the Labour Research Unit - a little known organisation set up to assist the fledgling labour movement. It was not a company, nor a statutory board, nor a government department - in fact it did not exist at all as a legal entity. Thus in slightly unorthodox circumstances I became part of that struggle.

All the laws made for the betterment of workers' lives have their origin with the workers. Hours are shortened,wages go up, conditions are better----only if the workers protest

The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.

The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

Unions have been the best anti-poverty program that actually worked and did not cost the government a dime. But as unions grow smaller- not stronger- our ability to act as an economic mechanism to distribute the gains of our work and raise all workers' wages and benefits up is disappearing.

I am always on the side of labor when there is any compromise to be made.

I will only stop defending the rights of workers when I die.

Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.

Every piece of progressive social legislation passed by Congress in the 20th century bears a union label.

As labor creates the wealth of the country, we demand the passage of such laws as may be necessary to protect it in all its rights.

Samuel Gompers has spent his life trying to keep labor from working too hard and has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

We'll organize workers in this movement as long as we're willing to sacrifice. The moment we stop sacrificing, we stop organizing.

I'm not going to ask for anything unless the workers want it. If they want it, they'll ask for it.

To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that.

Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.

I've been a longtime advocate of farmworker rights.

Johnny Cash was a rebel, not only just in the musical sense, but he was somebody who was for the people, and an advocate for labor, for workers, for prisoners, people who have been trapped by the criminal justice system.

We need to support new organizing strategies for employees who too often have never had the benefit of collective bargaining, and we have to resist the assault on workers' rights.