Trade Unions Quotes - Page 3

• I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.

  Saffron Burrows

  Thinking, Movement, Unions

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• GLHR... has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion - dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century.

  Naomi Klein

  Impact, Media, Style

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• No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Kings, Jobs, Fall

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• Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.

  Jacques Delors

  Past, Employment, Unions

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• As I, as a worker, came to know them, the aims of German trade unions were political, and there were a number of various trade unions with varied political views.

  Fritz Sauckel

  Numbers, Views, Political

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• You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament.

  Arthur Scargill

  Party, Cutting, Views

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• The trade unions in the UK are campaigning around zero-hours contracts, which isn't about feminism, but it's a feminist issue. Women are affected by zero-hours contracts, and the recession has and is affecting women more than men.

  Rachel Holmes

  Zero, Men, Issues

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• This conviction brought me, in the summer of 1978, to the Free Trade Unions - formed by a group of courageous and dedicated people who came out in the defense of the workers' rights and dignity.

  Lech Walesa

  Summer, Rights, People

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• There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.

  Susan George

  Party, People, Political

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• There's no point in just hankering for the big trade unions of the 1950s or '60s.

  Duncan Green

  Unions, Bigs, Trade

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I would not go so far as to say that the French trade unions attached greater importance to the struggle for peace than the others did; but they certainly seemed to take it more to heart.

  Leon Jouhaux

  Struggle, Heart, Unions

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• The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

  Arthur Scargill

  Party, Giving, Support

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• Whole ideology of consumption almost to the point of religion. Whether it's the consumption of entertainment or the consumption around buying things, we're so caught up with our appetites that we don't have a clear distinction about what we need and what we just want. Plus, the decline of trade unions is a factor. When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

  Danny Glover

  Powerful, Class, Ideas

  Interview with Ed Rampell, progressive.org. February 8, 2012.

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• The post-Second World War simple system of social democracy and organized labour has fragmented massively, but just because people aren't organized in workplace trade unions doesn't mean they aren't in associations with other people - work-based, place-based, culture-based, sport-based, faith-based - there's a bit of an old rainbow coalition argument.

  Duncan Green

  Sports, War, Mean

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Security was the demand which set in motion labour movements in history; trade unions, friendly societies, consumer cooperatives were all about compensating for the impotence of individual resistance.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Labour Movement, Friendly, Demand

  Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

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• We have a series of regular meetings with South African business. Big business. Black business. Agriculture. As well, of course, with the trade unions. A whole series of meetings like that which engage issues that these South African social partners need to address.

  Thabo Mbeki

  Agriculture, Issues, Black

  Source: www.gov.za

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• There are established processes of consultation between the Government, the parastatals and the trade unions, which have worked in the past. And I don't see any particular reason why they shouldn't work.

  Thabo Mbeki

  Past, Government, Unions

  Source: www.gov.za

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• The greatest danger to an adequate old-age security plan is rising prices. A rise of 2% a year in prices would cut the purchasing power of pensions about 45% in 30 years. The greatest danger of rising prices is from wages rising faster than output per man-hour.... Whether the nation succeeds in providing adequate security for retired workers depends in large measure upon the wage policies of trade unions.

  Sumner Slichter

  Cutting, Men, Years

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• Managing the other fellow's business is a fascinating game. Trade unionists all over the country have pronounced ideas for the reform of Wall Street banks; and Wall Street bankers are not far behind in giving plans for the tremendous improvement of trade union policies. Wholesalers have schemes for improving the retailer; the retailer knows just what is wrong in the conduct of wholesale business-and we might go through a long list.... Yet for some reason the classes that ought to be helped keep on stubbornly clinging to their own method of running their affairs.

  B. C. Forbes

  Running, Country, Wall

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• Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Struggle, Class, Our World

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

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• I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.

  Bob Gunton

  Father, Son, Knights

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

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• Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.

  Adolf Hitler

  Party, Order, Russia

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• Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.

  A.C. Grayling

  Christian, Religious, Voice

  "This much I know". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2009.

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• Everybody is entitled to believe. Churches have exactly the same right to exist as a football club, a trade union or a political party. But if you and I set up the Church of the Fairies of the Garden, then I don't think we should automatically be meeting the queen, be entitled to seats in the House of Lords or get public money for our fairy schools.

  A.C. Grayling

  Football, Queens, Party

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• Achieving sustainable ways of living is inextricably linked to how we organize work in the future. State of the World 2014 makes an important contribution by illustrating how trade unions, far from being outdated, will be at the forefront of a just transition. It is a challenging compilation?coming at exactly the right time.

  Sharan Burrow

  Challenges, Important, World

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