Trade Unions Quotes - Page 2

• For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Home, Fate

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Age, Unions, Ghost

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• The dissolution of the trade unions was in the air then.

  Fritz Sauckel

  Air, Unions, Trade

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• It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even - if need be - to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work in them at all costs.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Sacrifice, Order, Able

  "V.I. Lenin Selected Works" by Vladimir Lenin, vol. 10, (p. 95), 1938.

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• Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

  Angela Davis

  Kings, Moving, Thinking

  "Frontline", www.pbs.org. 1997.

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• Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

  John Ruskin

  Giving Up, Men, Titles

  1880 Open letter to EnglishTrades Unions, 29 Sep.

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• Given the fact that many thousands of female workers are active in history, it is vital for the trade unions to incorporate them into their movement.

  Clara Zetkin

  Female, Movement, Unions

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• When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

  Langston Hughes

  Moon, Color, Talking

  Langston Hughes (2002). “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on art, race, politics, and world affairs”, p.270, University of Missouri Press

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• there is nothing more American than the trade-union movement.

  Rose Schneiderman

  Movement, Unions, Trade

  Rose Schneiderman, Lucy Goldthwaite (1967). “All for one”

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• What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

  Lech Walesa

  Independent, People, Unions

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• One of the proven ways of getting workers more involved with their jobs is by dovetailing employee profit-sharing and stock ownership plans with greater responsibility sharing... Trade unions in this country should... consider these arrangements much more carefully than they have up to now... Expanded employee profit participation and stock ownership would provide workers with a greater measure of economic and social independence, thus stimulating increased productivity.

  Jacob K. Javits

  Wisdom, Country, Jobs

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• The hellish instruments of war must be smoked out while there is still peace. The Trade Union Movement must be compelled not to allow their old resolutions to fade in the files.

  Carl von Ossietzky

  War, Movement, Unions

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• The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

  Ernest Mandel

  Real, Class, Historical

  Ernest Mandel (1994). “Revolutionary Marxism and social reality in the 20th century: collected essays”, Humanities Press Intl

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• There are plenty of people who don't want change - the Labour Party, some of their militant trade union friends like Unite busy causing strikes at the very beginning of a fragile recovery.

  George Osborne

  Party, Recovery, People

  Source: blog.moneysavingexpert.com

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• God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little ... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty ... I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman ... not enough to support a man and five children if he insists on smoking and drinking beer. But the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live! A family may live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at night!

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Morning, Children, Humorous

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• At Leeds the idea of an international labour organization appeared in a trade-union text which also drew attention to the danger to the working classes inherent in the existence of international capitalist competition.

  Leon Jouhaux

  Class, Organization, Ideas

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• When I came back to India after Harvard Business School, I started as a lawyer and as a trade union leader.

  P. Chidambaram

  School, Leader, India

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• Having spent a number of my younger years with trade-union parents attending NUT annual conferences, I feel comfortable with an agenda in my hand and a procedural format for debate.

  Saffron Burrows

  Hands, Years, Nuts

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• We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

  Edward Heath

  Children, Sick, Unions

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• There is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn't have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.

  Bob Hawke

  Country, Government, Doubt

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.

  Alain Badiou

  Ignorance, Media, Television

  Alain Badiou (2009). “The meaning of Sarkozy”, Verso Books

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• Speaking of myself, I was made to realize long ago that the old trade union was utterly incompetent to deal successfully with the exploiting corporations in this struggle. I was made to see that in craft unionism the capitalist class have it within their power to keep the workers divided, to use one part of them to conquer and crush another part of them. Indeed, I was made to see that the old form of unionism separates the workers and keeps them helpless at the mercy of their masters.

  Eugene V. Debs

  Crush, Struggle, Long Ago

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• The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

  Henry George

  Philosophy, Organization, Political

  Henry George (1911). “perplexed philosopher [Herbert Spencer”

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• Social Democratic and trade union organs have approved of the illegal invasion of Belgium, of the massacre of suspected guerrillas, as well as their wives and children, as well as the destruction of their homes in various towns and districts.

  Clara Zetkin

  Children, Home, Wife

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• I have managed to infuriate the bank bosses; acquire a fatwa from the revolutionary guards of the trades union movement; frighten the 'Daily Telegraph' with a progressive graduate payment; and upset very rich people who are trying to dodge British taxes. I must be doing something right.

  Vince Cable

  People, Boss, Upset

  "Liberal Democrat Conference: Vince Cable Speech in Full". www.theguardian.com. September 22, 2010.

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