Unionized Workforce Quotes

Labor unions have a long history of benefitting all workers, even those who are not members of unions, because everyone's wages go up. If we don't increase membership - and membership in labor unions is going down because of the attacks against organized labor - it's something every single American, whether they're officially in a union or not, should be concerned about. It's a spiral. It's a weakening of the middle class and our economy can't sustain that.

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.

When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

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.

My preference is that employees pay their union dues, but what I also get is that I'd rather someone be in the union than not in the union.

We'll be competitive with organized labor, we're also competitive with regular, unorganized labor, working people who see their stakes and their future in the plans we're putting forward to move Massachusetts forward.

A basic assumption shapes most Americans’ mindset about labor: the belief that the death of unions isn’t my problem because I’m not in a union. That assumption is wrong. Even if you aren’t a member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.

Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.

And I'm convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you can work with the unions because the unions want to survive. If they are confronted simply with the question: "Do you want this company to survive or do you want it to be broken up?" they will listen. It's their livelihood.

To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that.

There is a middle class in America for only one reason: organized labor. If not for organized labor, where would you find a job where you had some sense that you had a shot of leaving behind something better than you inherited?.

The state of the Union largely depends on the state of the unions.

My dad's first-ever real true job was at Ford Motor Company. He was a UAW member.