Workplaces & Worksites Quotes

Where after all do universal human rights begin? In small places, closes to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

OSHA can’t and won’t do its job…. the current OSHA injury and illness information is inaccurate in part due to wide-scale underreporting by employers and OSHA’s willingness to accept these falsified numbers

If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there.

A premium is sometimes put on impropriety of conduct on the women’s part by the foreman. That is, a woman who will submit or respond to his course jokes and language and evil behaviour receives more work than the woman who feels and shows herself insulted by such conduct, and wishes to preserve her self-respect. The pittance earned by some of these women is earned at the expense of more than only hard toil. Even when this coarseness is confined to language only, it causes deep suffering to some of the women. They feel, they know, that because they are women and therefore regarded as helpless and inferior, they are spoken to as men are not spoken to, and the sting enters their souls.

We need to turn bystanders and enablers into allies. Ninety-eight percent of United States corporations right now have sexual harassment training policies. Seventy percent have prevention programs. But still, overwhelmingly, bystanders and witnesses don't come forward. In 2016, the Harvard Business Review called it the "bystander effect." And yet -- remember 9/11. Millions of times we've heard, "If you see something, say something." Imagine how impactful that would be if we carried that through to bystanders in the workplace regarding sexual harassment -- to recognize and interrupt these incidences; to confront the perpetrators to their face; to help and protect the victims. This is my shout-out to men: we need you in this fight. And to women, too -- enablers to allies.

Today, because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

Where you stand depends on where you work.

[When sexually harassed a woman should] be fierce. It starts when we stand tall, and we build that self-confidence. And we stand up and we speak up, and we tell the world what happened to us. I know it's scary, but let's do it for our kids. Let's stop this for the next generations. I know that I did it for my children.

Nine-tenths of the socialistic and semi-socialistic, and sentimental or ethical, suggestions by which we are overwhelmed come from failure to understand the phenomena of the industrial organization and its expansion. It controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the conditions of our existence, sets the limits of our social activity, regulates the bonds of our social relations, determines our conceptions of good and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our inherited political institutions, and reforms the oldest and toughest customs…

Sexual harassment doesn't discriminate. You can wear a skirt, hospital scrubs, army fatigues. You can be young or old, married or single, black or white. You can be a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent. I heard from so many women: police officers, members of our military, financial assistants, actors, engineers, lawyers, bankers, accountants, teachers ... journalists. Sexual harassment, it turns out, is not about sex. It's about power, and about what somebody does to you to try and take away your power. And I'm here today to encourage you to know that you can take that power back.

Today, difficulties that a mere two or three years ago would have passed for private matters – for conflicts between students and teachers, workers and employers, or marital partners, for conflicts between individual – now claim political significance and ask to be justified in political terms. Psychology seems to turn to politics…