Sunday, September 3, 2017 – Labor on Labor Day
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
Although it is true that only about twenty percent of American workers are in unions, that twenty 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. ~ Molly Ivins
The important role of union organizations must be admitted: their object is the representation of the various categories of workers, their lawful collaboration in the economic advance of society, and the development of the sense of their responsibility for the realization of the common good. ~ Pope Paul VI
We want only loyal workers who are grateful from the bottom of their hearts for the bread which we let them earn. ~ Gustav Krupp
I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field. ~ Albert Einstein
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. ~ George Orwell
A Mission Statement is a dense slab of words that a large organization produces when it needs to establish that its workers are not just sitting around downloading internet porn. ~ Dave Barry
At this point, American workers are pretty respectful of the bosses they loathe. ~ Ted Rall
I can walk through the front door of any factory and out the back and tell you if it’s making money or not. I can just tell by the way it’s being run and by the spirit of the workers. ~ Harvey S. Firestone
The employers cannot carry on industry nor accumulate profits if they have not got the good will of the workers or their acquiescence in carrying on such industry. ~ James Larkin
In the early days I didn’t have the money to pay decent salaries, so I didn’t get good people. I got nice people, but I didn’t get good employees. ~ Louise Hay
The capitalists speculate on the two following factors: the female worker must be paid as poorly as possible and the competition of female labor must be employed to lower the wages of male workers as much as possible. ~ Clara Zetkin
The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. ~ Karl Marx
The organized workers of America, free in their industrial life, conscious partners in production, secure in their homes and enjoying a decent standard of living, will prove the finest bulwark against the intrusion of alien doctrines of government. ~ John L. Lewis
The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience. ~ Lech Walesa
The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers. It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish. ~ Samuel Gompers
The corporation is the “master” and the employee is the “servant” – and because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa. ~ Peter Drucker
Our labor unions are not narrow, self-seeking groups. They have raised wages, shortened hours and provided supplemental benefits. Through collective bargaining and grievance procedures, they have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor. ~ John F. Kennedy, August 30, 1960
With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men. ~ Clarence Darrow, The Railroad Trainman, November 1909
You know, when I was in college, there was a big debate: Do unions raise wages? Well, with regard to industrial unions, there were arguments back and forth – international competition. It is now clear, I think, that whether or not you think unions raised wages fifty years ago, the absence of unions and their weakness that is inflicted by anti-union public policy depresses wages. The fact is that people, who are not represented, in the service industries in particular, are the victims of policies which depress their wages. ~ Barney Frank, January 3, 2007
To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines – to realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen – human companionship on the job, and music in the home – to be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father – to know these things is to understand what American labor means. ~ Adlai Stevenson, September 22, 1952
If we take back the labor unions, the legitimate businesses, eventually they become just another street gang. Spiritually, psychologically, they’ve always been just a street gang. ~ Rudolph W. Giuliani
Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. ~ Bill Gates
I know I can act. There aren’t too many other jobs I know how to do. ~ Jack Nicholson
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up. ~ Muhammad Ali
It’s not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters. ~ Vanna White
What I’m getting at is, you know, if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street and getting people jobs, we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half. ~ Jello Biafra
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. ~ John Updike
Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar. ~ Drew Carey
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. ~ Oscar Wilde
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. ~ Aristotle
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work. ~ John G. Pollard
A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward. ~ George Jean Nathan
I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy. ~ Danny McGoorty
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence. ~ Honoré de Balzac
More men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. ~ Rudyard Kipling
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. ~ Bertrand Russell
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. ~ Karl Marx
If you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way. ~ Homer Simpson
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?” ~ Don Marquis
I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave. ~ Joseph Campbell
If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue. ~ Peter Ustinov
Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. ~ Orson Scott Card
Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders. ~ Ronald Reagan
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun. ~ Thomas Carlyle
The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you’re on the job. ~ Slappy White
What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed? ~ Gerald Barzan
A man’s labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization. ~ William Booth
An unemployed existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset
You take my life when you take the means whereby I live. ~ William Shakespeare, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. ~ Oscar Wilde
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. ~ Jane Austen
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense. ~ Max Frisch
The poor tread lightest on the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and the more havoc we wreak. ~ Paul Harrison
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality. ~ George Bernard Shaw
It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. ~ Aeschylus
A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income. ~ Lord Chesterfield
Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge. ~ George William Curtis
Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too? ~ Bill Veeck
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. ~ Henry David Thoreau
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. ~ D. H. Lawrence
What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? ~ Mark Twain
I cannot afford to waste my time making money. ~ Louis Agassiz
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either. ~ Robert Graves
When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart. ~ John Wesley
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~ Woody Allen
I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves. ~ Joe Louis
Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. ~ John Maynard Keynes
The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm – capitalism is that kind of a system. ~ Milton Friedman
Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class. ~ Al Capone
Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. ~ Eugene V. Debs
A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. ~ Howard Scott
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Worldwide capitalism kills more people every day then Hitler did. And he was crazy. ~ Ken Livingstone
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. ~ Bertrand Russell
Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way. ~ David Korten
Capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. ~ Joseph A. Schumpeter
Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. ~ Pat Robertson
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. ~ Milton Friedman
The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. ~ Albert Einstein
If you like capitalism, you will positively love depressions, because they are one and the same, like manic-depressives and their cycles, like spouse-abusers and their storms of violence. ~ Kenneth Smith
A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism – the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. ~ Michael Pollan
There is hardly anything in the world that some man can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey. ~ John Ruskin
When we truly discover love, capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary. ~ Will O’Brien
Just Above Sunset 