Labor History Quotes

The concept of a 'job' is pretty recent. If you go back a few hundred years, everyone was either a slave or a serf, or living off slave or serf labor to pursue science or philosophy or art.

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.

The modern labor movement that began around the mid-19th century has given us many of the basic working rights that we now take for granted.

The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt.

The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For me, I've always been fascinated by tales of the Chinese railroad and the workers and the conditions of the workers who built the railroad.

Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City.

I'm just a normal guy and blue-collar historian, and people keep tuning in.

My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California, where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

I have no use for those- regardless of their political party- who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass.

The Labor Department's Hall of Honor recognizes men and women - like Cesar Chavez, Helen Keller and the Workers of the Memphis Sanitation Strike - who have made invaluable contributions to the welfare of American workers.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

I don't even know if I ever knew - some sweatshop in Baltimore. I knew with my other relatives - some of the women were in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and men were shop boys and things like that. I happened to be in Philadelphia, but the family was in New York. I could see what the union was doing for them.It really saved their lives.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.

I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.

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

We're talking about America - a country that's been built on the back of cheap labor. That's addicted to cheap labor. Talk to the Chinese and Irish who built the railroads. Talk to the black people who built the South. So what is the US-Mexico conversation really about?

Unions have been the only powerful and effective voice working people have ever had in the history of this country.

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

I'm aware enough, I guess, of American labor history.

Labor has a proud history of tackling discrimination and introducing important social reform.

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that, I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.

Black men built the railroads, not blue eyes.

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.

The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back.