American Labor Leader Quotes

Cesar Chavez

Jimmy Hoffa

Samuel Gompers

John L. Lewis

Sidney Hillman

Lane Kirkland

Rose Schneiderman

The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.

When you sacrifice, you force others to sacrifice. It's an extremely powerful weapon.

I've said consistently that no employer ever really accepts a union. They tolerate the unions. The very minute they can get a pool of unemployment they'll challenge the unions and try to get back what they call managements prerogatives, meaning hire, fire, pay what you want.

The plain truth is that labor is the chief representative force that keeps the real special interests from dominating American political life.

The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle... present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.

My father... rarely smiled. Then I did not know why, but now I do know that it was overwork, under-nourishment and the burdens of daily living which had made a broken man out of him, although still so young in years. His eyes were perpetually inflamed by the coal dust which also gnawed away at his lungs and made him spit out black sputum.

Politics is the science of how who gets what, when and why.

Unions were created to make living conditions just a little better than they were before they were created, and the union that does not manifest that kind of interest in human beings cannot endure, it cannot live.

There is nothing more American than the trade-union movement.

Rose Schneiderman

I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in our country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.

The vast majority (over 80 percent) of fast-food and similar low wage service jobs (<$9.24/hr) are held by adults. A quarter are adults over 40. Another quarter are moms raising kids.