Labor Control Quotes

Fight labor's demands to the last ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes itself sovereign and takes what it used to ask.

Capital must be protected. If its operations be not left free, if they are to be controlled by bodies of workmen, it will leave this for some more favored country

Control would be exercised by a few over the political conduct of the many by first acquiring that control over the labor and earnings of the great body of people.

More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.

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

What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.

If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.

The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed. No one—neither tenants nor their landlords—had any problem making children and women work in the fields.

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

In the history of the world, slavery has been and still is the normal condition of most men; all the great accumulations of property have been the result of slavery, and civilization was the result of property…. art, literature, science, architecture, beautiful women, and gentlemen of leisure all depend upon the forced labor of masses of ignorant men whom to make free would be a social crime.

I'm signing on to be an athlete, and it's almost like Karl Marx's theory on capitalism. I am both the worker and the product. I'm choosing to be a part of this system, thus I'm choosing to be part of the conditions that are set in this system.

The traditional policy is absolutely opposed to compulsory labor for private employment... It is a point of fundamental importance that there is no question of force or compulsion, but only of encouragement and advice through the native chiefs and headmen…

It means that the men who hold the means of life control our lives, and, because we workingmen have tried to get some measure of justice, some measure of betterment, they deny the right of the human being to associate with his fellow.

This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work - they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps.

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.

When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.

Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.

Sanctions and workfare make it easier for employers to impose insecure practices on desperate people.

... the place where [adults] pass the most time and submit to the closest control is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world economy's ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody's productive activity, it's apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is _not_ the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

The essence of slavery is that it takes from the producer all he produces, except just enough to keep the producer in working condition.

The whole policy of the Cotton dynasty tends necessarily to making broader the chasm between these orders is most apparent. It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age -- other people's money -- these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in..

[William Z.] Foster was a trade union organizer without a peer. In each case, however, his work was permitted and controlled by other forces which Foster had to serve....

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late …. The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same — whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.