Union Politics Quotes

Such pushy people, the school union chiefs.It's almost not worth the campaign donations. Almost.

Attacking communists was generally nothing more than a smokescreen for attacking the CIO.

Being a conservative union member is almost like being an actor in Hollywood: You don't dare say it, or you might be injured on the job, or you might be laid off, or your family might have something happen to them.

Men trade unionists are accused of sex privilege and prejudice ... A belief in the divine right of every man to his job is not peculiar to kings and capitalists, and men in organized trades are not disposed to share these advantages with a host of women competitors.

Having spent a number of my younger years with trade-union parents attending NUT annual conferences, I feel comfortable with an agenda in my hand and a procedural format for debate.

After contract negotiations and organizing, playing an active role in the political process is one of a union's most important functions. Gains won at the bargaining table or through sacrifice on the picketline can be wiped out by politicians on the state or federal level.

So why am I facing a recall election? Simple: the big government union bosses from Washington want their money. They don't like the fact that I did something fundamentally pro-worker; something that's truly about freedom.

Gov. Scott Walker, a Tea Party-tinged Republican, is the advance guard of a new GOP push to dismantle public-sector unions as an electoral force.

I just think the most important aspect in being able to have a productive relationship between the teachers' unions and the districts and the states that they're dealing with is that the person sitting across the table from them should not have received the largest campaign contributions from the teachers' union itself.

… the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.

They [the union] were members of the Communist Party - they didn't care one way or another about Russia, they just cared about the United States.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money is this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.

The people who are making you feel under attack is your union leadership, and they're doing it for politically intense reasons.

The automobile industry was made up of men, primarily who had never been in any union before, and who were completely inexperienced, not knowing even how to make a motion on the floor …. But the members of the Communist Party know how to speak; some of them had extensive soap-box experience …. It is very simple for a man who understands public speaking and parliamentary rules to control a meeting of unitiated people….By preparing motions ahead of time, having discussion ahead of time, and then by dividing up in various sections of the hall, the Communists would give the impression that the particular policy they were trying to have the meeting adopt was generally supported throughout the membership.

It's like there was the Union, and then there's the Union Management. In some of the strikes that I covered when I saw the strike starting to break, wasn't necessarily when Management was giving in, more so than when the strikers were at odds with the Union Management.

Irish Protestants as a whole liked self-government for Ireland when government was placed exclusively in Protestant hands, as was the case under the Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century. But the increasing pressure of the partially enfranchised Catholic majority frightened their leaders into accepting the Act of Union, and in the nineteenth century Irish Protestants learnt to accept the Union as the one possible guarantee against Catholic ascendancy in Ireland.

The AFL-CIO giving money to the Democratic Party has all the appearances of dinosaurs mating.

Opposition to the admission of a state into the union with a constitution prohibiting slavery, on account of such prohibition, is a policy wholly unjustifiable and unstatesmanlike, and in violation of that spirit of concession and compromise by which alone the federal constitution was, adopted, and by which alone it can be perpetuated.

The unionists also for their part, want to minimise the potential for change, not only on the equality agenda but on the issues of sovereignty and ending the union.