Unsafe Working Conditions Quotes

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.

The Panama railroad had been built by Americans over a half century ago, with appalling loss of life

Child labor in the industrial system is destructive and vicious, and that the employment of children in industry has to be forbidden. But this does not solve the problem of the child in industrial society.

I will use all my influence in trying to remove from our factory system the cruelties which are practiced in our mills.

The fast food industry is rife with sexual harassment. These kids need the job and the supervisors--almost all male--take advantage of them.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration.

Were the workers who sweated to put food on my table paid at least minimum wage? Did they get health benefits? Overtime? Were they unionized? Protected from pesticide exposure?

I don’t like the work but mother is dead and father brought me down [to the mines.] I had no choice. I have a harness on like a horse and pull carts. Large carts hold seven and a half hundredweight. [750 lbs.]

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

If there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed ... it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.

Foreign workers typically migrate to Malaysia willingly, looking for greater opportunities, but often fall into forced labor or debt bondage.

[Industrialists] maim and slaughter workers by thousands.

At about an age when most children start full time schooling, hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries start a lifetime of drudgery in factories and fields, working 12-16 hours daily.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germanys of Jesuitism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory

In the 'Nike Economy,' there are no standards, no borders and no rules. Clearly, the global economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

Coal mining is an industry rife with mismanagement, corruption, greed and an almost blatant disregard for the safety, health and quality of life of its work force. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known it.

Ask the widows and orphans of the thousands of men killed annually through the avarice of railroad corporations refusing to avail themselves of modern appliances in coupling and other improvements on their railroads. Inquire from the thousands of women and children whose husbands or fathers were suffocated or crushed in the mines through the rapacious greed of stockholders clamoring for more dividends.

It is not to be supposed that children so young could remain, with the intervals of meals only, from six in the morning until seven in the evening, in constant employment, on their feet, within cotton mills, and afterwards acquire much proficiency in education.

To be honest, it was slavery. Nobody should have any romantic ideas about working underground. It's very, very dangerous. You always knew you were living in danger. You were on your hands and knees half the day.

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?