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“Rapid growth in wealth inequality results in the inevitable isolation of a very small, very rich, very privileged section of the community from the material experiences of everyone else. And when this out-of-touch minority group is enfranchised to make the decisions on behalf of people they don't know, can't see, have no wish to understand, and think of entirely in dehumanised, transactional, abstract terms, the results for the rest of us are devastating.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“It's absurd to think about how a $1,600 stipend changed the course of my life. It's absurd to think about how many internships are still unpaid, and how elitist and morally corrupt it is to hire unpaid or underpaid labor.”
― Kimberly Drew, This Is What I Know About Art

“Bah! Do you think the poor people of the barrio pay for the upkeep of the Church? No! Wealth flows from wealth! And sources of wealth need stability to exist! And the Church provides stability! We teach the poor how to bear their burden; they are promised the kingdom of heaven, which is far more important than the little gains your strike would make â€�”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Heart of Aztlan

“Proletaryanın, zincirlerinden baÅŸka kaybedecek bir ÅŸeyi yoktur. Ama kazanacakları bir dünya vardır.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“I know too much from personal observation from how the poor and working classes live to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.”
― Vida Goldstien, 1891

“Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“But privatisation has another important function in the neoliberal world view, and that's to assist wage suppression.
If you're a private company, you've got one overriding obligation, and it's not to your workers, to your country or your community - it's to make a profit, in order to return it in dividends to your shareholders. That's it. And the means to increase that rate of return to its greatest possible margin is cutting the cost of your operation. You do this by increasing your productivity, expanding your market, raising prices on your offered commodities, and by reducing the wages and conditions of the people who work for you.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“It is more important to look holistically at the root of why anyone would want to avoid work so badly that they’d game the system and leave the workforce altogether. When work is fulfilling, dignifying, respects our skills and nourishes our talents and souls, it becomes a pleasure not a burden; something we would look for not run away from.

[From “On the Great Resignationâ€� published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such a fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr Bounderby's gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used -- that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts -- he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would 'sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic'. This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Precipitous decisions by companies pertaining to employees, devoid of documented established ground of denial of any of the demands or rights sought by the employees, or as adumbrated in law, would be construed in all probability unpalatable by the labor department and Judiciary.”
― Henrietta Newton Martin

“It was nicer that way. knowing that something called rights existed. The right to health care, to good and to schooling for our children . . . For us things were good; for others they were bad. Especially for the landowners, who are the ones who suffered most when we demanded our rights. They spend more and earn less.
Besides, once we learned about the existence of rights we also learned not to bow our heads when the bosses scolds us.
We learned to look them in the face.”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“...We would see people wanting to work, not for pennies on the dollar, or to try and keep up with inflation, but because their Government is taking care of them. The people make up the country, not the money. The money is a profiteering system which works more like a secondary reward.”
― D.M. Shiro, The Grate

“Those sons of bitches up there are to blame!' Another worker shouted and jumped forward. He shook an angry fist at the blank faces that looked down on the death scene from the offices atop the yard administration. 'Sánchez’s work crew had been cut back twice! It’s unsafe to work with so few men! You all know that! Yes, someone’s to blame, and the blame lies with those bastards that treat us like animals and our rotten union that won’t protect us!”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Heart of Aztlan

“Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The workers stayed in the plant instead of walking out, and this had clear
advantages: they were directly blocking the use of strikebreakers; they
did not have to act through union officials but were in direct control
of the situation themselves; they did not have to walk outside in the
cold and rain, but had shelter; they were not isolated, as in their work,
or on the picket line; they were thousands under one roof, free to
talk to one another, to form a community of struggle. Louis Adamic,
a labor writer, describes one of the early sit-downs:

Sitting by their machines, cauldrons, boilers and work benches, they talked.
Some realized for the first time how important they were in the process of
rubber production. Twelve men had practically stopped the works! . . . Superintendents, foremen, and straw bosses were dashing about. . . . In less than
an hour the dispute was settled, full victory for the men.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“The Australian union movement called an 'illegal' general strike in 1976, when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's government was trying to destroy our embryonic universal healthcare system. That strike brought the country to a standstill. Fraser backed down, and what became Medicare remains. The same people who disagree [with strike action] may also want to reflect on this the next time they enjoy a leisurely weekend, or are saved from an accident by workplace safety standards, or knock off work after an eight-hour shift. Union members won all these conditions in campaigns that were deemed 'illegal' industrial actiona at the time. These union members built the living standards we all enjoy. They should be celebrated and thanked for their bravery and sacrifices, not condemned and renounced.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“The spectacle of that gathering [a NSW Teachers' Federation protest in the late 1980s], the might of its unified purpose, the feeling of solidarity and strength, resonated with me in a way that has shaped my beliefs and my actions ever since. Union power is this simple act of solidarity - of people realising what we have in common, and deciding both to stick together and to act.”
― Sally McManus

“Unionisation, of course, obstructs the extent to which employers are able to squeeze working people in their profit calculations, levelling the playing field between the single, powerful employer and the unified might of an organised workforce.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“When public service jobs are outsourced or privatised, and when the alternative to a job on the corporate sector's terms becomes no job at all, competition in the labour market disappears, allowing wage and job conditions across the board to be driven down.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“Every single Australian benefits from superannuation, Medicare, the weekend and the minimum wage - these were all won by our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents taking non-violent, so-called illegal industrial action.
Working people only take these measures when the issue is one of justice, like ensuring workers' safety on a worksite, a fair day's pay for a fair day's work or to uphold or improve the rights of working people.
Without the Australian trade union movement our country would look like the US where these rights are inadequate or do not exist.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“There is a huge shift to rewiring people from working class families to pursue education that is cheap, but profitable for corporations and corporatized educational institutions, and that is just enough for them to be trained as malleable workers at the service of the ruling class and their needs. We are in a country in which the few rich and privileged get quality education, while everyone else gets cheap training and acquire mediocre skills in the form of certificates of completion. The children of the rich go to Yale and Harvard and other big names, while those from poor working-class families get certificates in this or that skill that they can add to their resumes to be desired by employers.

[From “On the Great Resignationâ€� published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“The government is toxic!”
― Steven Magee

“Of course, she also greatly inspired countless others paving the way for girls and women of future generations. All Americans owe her a debt of gratitude. It brings to mind a Chinese proverb: "When you are drinking the water, never forget who dug the well.”
― Ruth Cashin Monsell, Frances Perkins: Champion of American Workers

“Her legacy lies not just in the New Deal achievements she brought about, but in the regularly updated codes that protect workers in offices and factories everywhere. Today few people appreciate how different life was before Frances Perkins. We take for granted that children can go to school, not mills or coal mines every day; that people work for eight hours, not fifteen; that they get paid "time and a half" for overtime; that they can receive checks when unemployed or disabled; that they needn't dread the day when they can no longer work. Over seventy million Americans receive benefits under Social Security every month. The figure includes retirees, survivors, dependents, and the disabled.

There was only one priority item on her famous wish list she presented to FDR before becoming Secretary of Labor that she and the New Deal were not able to fulfill. It was universal health care. She left us a single major unfilled goal, one we as a nation are still striving to realize.”
― Ruth Cashin Monsell, Frances Perkins: Champion of American Workers

“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

“Scientific management, so-called, is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises. It lacks the characteristics of a true science because its assumptions reflect nothing more than the outlook of the capitalist with regard to the conditions of production. It starts, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, not from the human point of view but from the capitalist point of view, from the point of view of the management of a refractory work force in a setting of antagonistic social relations. It does not attempt to discover and confront the cause of this condition, but accepts it as an inexorable given, a “naturalâ€� condition. It investigates not labor in general, but the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital.”
― Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century