Labor Dispute Quotes

There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.

A labor strike will tear away a lot of the good things going for this league.

Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.

A strike cannot be tolerated under any circumstances for it would be a stab at our armed might.

Thank God we have a system of labor where there can be a strike.

I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.

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.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

And so we said to General Motors that the solution had to be a first year increase, which had to be sizeable because we had to catch up with the lost position as against the cost of living and we had to make some progress.

Strike is always a form of direct action. With the strike, too, you are not asking government to make things easier for you by passing legislation, you are taking a direct action against the employer.

With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn't consider dying.

I'm not going to stop beating up on the unions.

Voting to go on strike is not a decision working people take lightly and is always accompanied by a strong sense of injustice at work. The impact of losing a day's pay is significant, not least for those in the lowest paid jobs who are already on the tightest budgets.

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..

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.

We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.

The number of men out on strike exceeds that of any other industrial contest in the history of our country.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

Strikes always leave a bad taste with everyone.

The courts may have their finest hours, but they'll not break us. We will not settle for one penny less than our objectives. The judge can drop dead in his black robes. I don't care if I rot in jail. I will not call off the strike.

Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.

The players wanted more money, higher salary caps and they didn't have that family relationship we felt with the players. Mentally, the players were more businesslike.

I am writing a line on this subject to the head of the union. In war time it is considered essential to play "The Star Spangled Banner," but to employ musicians for this purpose and this purpose only, seems to be rather difficult. They certainly could not make a living wage on a short engagement of this kind. In this particular case, the theatre was being picketed because it was using a record instead of employing musicians.

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.