Sweatshops Quotes

• The clothes make the man. The children working in sweatshops make the clothes. Therefore, the children working in sweatshops make the man.

  Demetri Martin

  Children, Men, Clothes

  Twitter post from Mar 31, 2012

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• I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of . . . individualism, conquest and exploitation . . . A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name.

  Helen Keller

  Educational, Names, Smell

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• I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Peace, Interesting, People

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.151, W. W. Norton & Company

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• My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few.

  Jeffrey Sachs

  Concern

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• There are literally billions of people on the planet who live in an unimaginable poverty that's not in any way different from the plight of the people in Orchid. And you can't have the splendor of Rodeo Drive without the sweatshops of Indonesia; those two things go hand in hand.

  Tom Morello

  Hands, Orchids, Two

  Interview with Robin Grearson, logger.believermag.com. August 27, 2013.

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• It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.

  Kevin Bales

  Talking, Numbers, People

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• Be quiet, or my wife will take away your first born and make him or her work in one of her sweatshops!

  Marc Anthony

  Wife, Firsts, Quiet

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I'm politically on the left, no question about it. I oppose sweatshops, I oppose exploitation of labour in the third world.

  Norman Finkelstein

  World, Exploitation, Thirds

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• I have an idea for sweatshops: air conditioning! That's simple. 14 year old boys working twelve hour days? "Yeah, but they're comfortable!"

  Mitch Hedberg

  Funny, Humor, Boys

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• Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.

  Utah Phillips

  Country, Song, Brother

  Interview with David Kupfer, progressive.org. September 1, 2003.

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• People come to this country from all over the world to pursue their dreams of driving a taxi or selling hot dogs or working in a sweatshop.

  Greg Giraldo

  Dream, Country, Dog

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• In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

  Noam Chomsky

  Impact, Rights, Movement

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• SoHo was called Hell's Hundred Acres because it was full of sweatshops - without fire escapes. Completely not up to code. Every once in a while, these buildings would burn and 26 Puerto Ricans would be killed.

  Carl Andre

  Fire, Acres, Soho

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.

  Newt Gingrich

  Children, Years, Class

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• Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby-if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Country, Children, Kindness

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• For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Girl, Daughter, Mother

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• Not many academics do labor education. Why not? The need is great. This is where the youth are so important. If faculty were as engaged as young students are in anti sweatshop campaigns, prison campaigns, etc., it would be a good thing.

  Michael Yates

  Important, Would Be, Needs

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Because of GLHR's crusades... we're beginning to learn the awful truth about workers around the world who are slaving away their lives in sweatshops, who are denied the right to join or form a union in order to fight back and provide a better life for their families.

  John Sweeney

  Fighting, Impact, Order

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• If this goes into sweatshop labor, I'm quitting this podcast.

  Bill Burr

  Quitting, Labor, Ifs

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• Maybe careers aren’t something you can really plan for. They just sort of happen, like brown eyes or flat feet. I took one of those career aptitude tests last year, and it showed that I should be a flight attendant or a seamstress. Not a fashion designer or anything, mind you, but a sweatshop worker. Apparently stewardesses and sweatshop workers and I enjoy a lot of the same interests and activities.

  Susan Juby

  Fashion, Eye, Years

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• Synthetic Worlds is a surprisingly profound book about the social, political, and economic issues arising from the emergence of vast multiplayer games on the Internet. What Castronova has realized is that these games, where players contribute considerable labor in exchange for things they value, are not merely like real economies, they are real economies, displaying inflation, fraud, Chinese sweatshops, and some surprising in-game innovations.

  Tim Harford

  Real, Book, Player

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• Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

  David James Duncan

  Spiritual, Lonely, Couple

  David James Duncan (2007). “God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right”, p.99, Triad Institute, Inc.

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• I'm not going to let Donald Trump take away from our community, something that Fannie Lou Hamer shed blood to give us. Something that Ella Jo Baker braved conditions in the South and sweatshops in Harlem to give us.

  Van Jones

  Blood, Giving, Community

  Source: www.ebony.com

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• I don't even know if I ever knew - some sweatshop in Baltimore. I knew with my other relatives - some of the women were in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and men were shop boys and things like that. I happened to be in Philadelphia, but the family was in New York. I could see what the union was doing for them.It really saved their lives.

  Noam Chomsky

  New York, Boys, Men

  Source: www.iww.org

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• Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

  Rick Moody

  Country, Stupid, Moving

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