Union Organizing Quotes

The name of the game is to talk to people. If you don't talk to people, you can't get started...You knock on twenty doors or so, and twenty guys tell you to go to hell, or that they haven't got time. But maybe at the fortieth or sixtieth house you find the one guy who is all you need. You're not going to organize everything; you're just going to get it started.

Speaking of myself, I was made to realize long ago that the old trade union was utterly incompetent to deal successfully with the exploiting corporations in this struggle. I was made to see that in craft unionism the capitalist class have it within their power to keep the workers divided, to use one part of them to conquer and crush another part of them. Indeed, I was made to see that the old form of unionism separates the workers and keeps them helpless at the mercy of their masters.

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

You have a task; go bravely home and take it up like men …. Do your duty also as citizens of the United States, do your duty as men who feel a responsibility upon you, and remember, friends, that it is better to die an uncrowned free man than a crowned slave. You and I must protest against this injustice to the American people that we are suffering

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 came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.

Don't waste any time mourning—organize!

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.

If you are going to organize and ask for commitment, you cannot go to the most desperately poor. They are not likely to take action. If you stand on a man's head and push it into the dirt, he may not even see the heel of your boot. But if his whole face is already above ground, he can see your heel and he can see freedom ahead.

My mom pushed me in a baby carriage at Martin Luther King rallies. My grandfather was a union organizer. And to me, there is no room - no room - for discrimination of any kind. To me, it's just an anathema.

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

Back in early 1983, my dad was tasked with keeping unions from organizing in his company's distribution centers. His work pulled him away from home for months on end.

As for the workers' movement, I find that I reach workers more easily as neighbors than I do standing outside the factory despairingly giving out a leaflet telling them to take over, say the Ford plant.

In the ten years I was president of the Teamsters, I had raised the membership from eight hundred thousand to more than 2 million and made it the largest single labor union the world.

I think actually what I'm going to do when I'm done and take my next vacation, is I'm going to go over and start unions in Japan. I'm going to unionize Japan. Because the way they work those crews is so criminal. There's no overtime, so they can just keep going.

I am an organizer, not a union leader. A good organizer has to work hard and long. There are no shortcuts. You just keep talking to people, working with them, sharing, exchanging and they come along.

Organizing is an educational process. The best educational process in the union is the picket line and the boycott. You learn about life.

I would proceed to discharge every man ... who continued to foment, and cause a disturbance .... It would be a sad thing for some of the old white-haired engineers ... to be thrown out of work, but I told the Committee I should strike with an unsparing hand.

The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.

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

Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.

My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union.

Heed this cry that comes from the hearts of men. Organize the Unorganized.

Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.

I mean the reason the sit-down strikes struck such fear in the hearts of management was that they knew that a sit-down strike was just one step short of taking over the factory.