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“Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”
― William Cullen Bryant

“What precipices are sloth and pleasure! To do nothing is a sorry resolve to take; are you aware of that? To live in indolence on the goods of others, to be useless, that is to say, injurious! This leads straight to the depths of misery. Woe to the man who would be a parasite! He will become vermin! Ah, it does not please you to work! Ah, you have but one thought--to drink well, to eat well, and sleep well. You will drink water; you will eat black bread; you will sleep on a plank, with fetters riveted to your limbs, and you will feel their cold touch at night on your flesh!”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“...but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw form it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it)...”
― John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

“Since the war I have stressed altogether five main objectives. The true union of Europe; the union of government with science; the power of government to act rapidly and decisively, subject to parliamentary control; the effective leadership of government to solve the economic problem by use of the wage-price mechanism at the two key-points of the modern industrial world; and a clearly defined purpose for a movement of humanity to ever higher forms.”
― Oswald Mosley

“The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

“Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.”
― Jack London

“It is the principal paradox of this period that the only sphere of our economic system in which government intervention is urgently necessary is also the only point at which action of the State is now effectively inhibited. It is in the region of wages and prices that we really require the continual economic leadership of government, but in our prevailing trade structure any such suggestion has come to be regarded as impious.”
― Oswald Mosley

“And if it’s not me, it’s someone else. There are a million ways in which the body is stolen from us—debt and interest and data and labour and literal tissue and blood that can be harvested, and affective, sexual, and emotional energy. Capitalists, which clutch and pry and feed, dreaming up ways in which they can make your body not your own, and when the last drop of blood is exhausted they’ll have the audacity to bill you for it.”
― Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce

“Tax work less. Tax wealth more.”
― Gary Stevenson

“He had a face like the north face of the Eiger by the time we’d got to the bit where the three wise men were reviled as capitalist pigs. He took Miss Elf into the showers and had a ‘Quiet Wordâ€�. We all heard every word he shouted. He said he wanted to see a traditional Nativity play, with a Tiny Tears doll playing Jesus and three wise men dressed in dressing gowns and tea towels. He threatened to cancel the play if Mary, alias Pandora, continued to go into simulated labour in the manger. This is typical of Scruton, he is nothing but a small-minded, provincial, sexually-inhibited fascist pig. How he rose to become a headmaster I do not know. He has been wearing the same hairy green suit for three years.”
― Sue Townsend, The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾

“Uber’s chief innovation is not that its app summons a car to your location with a smartphone and a GPS signal. It is that it used this moderately novel configuration of technology to argue that the old rules did not apply whenever it brought its taxi business to a market that already had a regulated taxi code.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth.”
― Stefan Zweig

“We labor not to accomplish some task, for that is far too simple. We labor so that a child is a bit safer, a hunger satisfied, a house warmed, poverty brought to its knees, a dream brought to reality, a wound healed, a need met in whatever way that need is met. We labor to leave those for whom we have labored enriched in ways that could not have been possible were it not for our labor. Therefore, we would be wise to remember that it is in the sweat of our labors that we have the privilege of leaving the imprint of our legacies.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“But they also tried out something new- the language of false patriotism- where anything good for capitalism is labeled American and anything bad for capitalism is labeled un-American”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“Capitalists had discovered the pyramid of oppression- dividing people up into categories, ranking those categories based on differences the capitalists themselves promote, and then turning the categories against each other to fight over the promoted differences.”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“Solidarity: the ultimate working-class superpower”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“Ditching solidarity is never the answer.”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“Imagine we give workers a say in their working lives.”
― J. Albert Mann, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States

“If retail giants are claiming shortages on the first day of a strike, it's obvious they are using the situation as an opportunity to raise prices and increase profits.”
― Carlos Wallace, Why Sell Lies When The Truth Is Free

“Population is power, and nobody wants for work unless they're incurably idle.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ogres

“If the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labour, wages fall and some workers starve. Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive.

Marx draws another important point from the classical economists. Those who employ the workers - the capitalists - build up their wealth through the labour of their workers. They become wealthy by keeping for themselves a certain amount of the value their workers produce. Capital is nothing else but accumulated labour. The worker's labour increases the employer's capital. This increased capital is used to build bigger factories and buy more machines. This increases the division of labour. This puts more self-employed workers out of business. They must then sell their labour on the market. This intensifies the competition among workers trying to get work, and lowers wages.”
― Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

“AI Cannot take our jobsâ€�
many people say,
“It is not smart enough
to do our jobs� they insist.
Thus they talk
’cause they still don’t know
how dumb will be
their future jobs.”
― Herold Vesperi, The Age of the Button Pushers

“Newspapers as a whole are hostile to organized labor, and the public is therefore suspicious of organized labor whenever it moves to implement its rights. Whether the hostility be open or covert, it is nevertheless a notorious fact that all the effective efforts of labor to better its precarious economic position are misrepresented by the newspapers.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“Anne, üşüyorum sobayı yakamaz mısın?"
"Kömürümüz yok."
"Neden?"
"Çünkü baban işsiz kaldı."
"Neden?"
"Fazla kömür olduÄŸu için.”
― Gündüz Vassaf, Cehenneme Övgü: Gündelik Hayatta Totalitarizm

“No society is perfectly equal. So the risk of coercion always hovers over the choices people make in the labor market.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, a hive with no exit can never be a home, experience without sanctuary is but a shadow, a life that requires hiding is no life, touch without feel reveals no truth, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“It was not that such labor scared me—being a maid had always filled me with purpose. Cleaning was so necessary, whether you lived as a prince or a pauper, the work seemed to me almost sacred. It was only—I could no longer accept how I would be treated.”
― Jordan Ifueko, The Maid and the Crocodile

“They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money.”
― George Carlin

“Using adblock is digital slaveholding with a UX veneer: you demand labor, benefit from it, and deny the worker their due because the shackles are made of Javascript.”
― Daniel Vincent Kramer