“An excellent plumber is infinitely more
admirable than an incompetent philosopher….the society that scorns excellence
in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in
philosophy because it is exalted activity….will have neither good plumbing or
good philosophy….neither its pipes or its theories will hold water.”
-John
Gardner
“There is one point to which I ask brief
attention. It is an effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not
above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is
available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody
else commanding capital, somehow by the use, of it induces him to labor. Labor
is prior to, and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and
would not have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of
capital and deserves much higher consideration.”
-Abraham
Lincoln
“All that serves labor serves the nation. All
that harms is treason….If a man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he
is a liar… There is no America without labor, and to fleece one is to rob the
other.”
-Abraham
Lincoln
“The greatest discovery of my life is that
men who do the work never get rich.”
-Andrew
Carnegie
“The workers of this country do not worry me.
I can hire one half to kill the other half.”
-J.P. Morgan
“The labor movement has for its purpose the
securing of the best possible economic and social conditions for the masses and
the attainment of these with the least possible friction, the meeting of
problems as they confront us: the making of the day after this a better day
than the one preceding.”
-Samuel Gompers
“What does labor want?…We want more
schoolhouses and less jails…more books and less arsenals; more learning and
less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact,
more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”
-Samuel Gompers
“While we are fighting for freedom, we must
see, among other things, that labor is free.”
-Woodrow
Wilson
“If I were a worker in a factory, the first
thing I would do would be to join a union.”
-Franklin
D. Roosevelt
“The right to join a union of one’s choice is
unquestioned today, and is sanctioned and protected by law.”
-Harry
S. Truman
“Only a fool would try to deprive working men
and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”
-Dwight
D. Eisenhower
“For democracy to be understood and
meaningful, it has to be a participatory democracy. You have to have a role in
it yourself. Now voting once every four years for a president in Washington or
every two years for a congressman is very important. But it is equally, if not
more important, to be able to participate in determining under what
circumstances you will sweat it out every day in the shop for eight or ten
hours and what you’ll be paid for it, and when you’re too old to work and too
young to die, whether you’ll have a little something to take care of you. That
kind of participatory democracy is equally important because democracy has to
stand on two feet. One is political and the other is economic.”
-Victor
Ruether
“Until we get the wage levels down much
closer to those of Brazil and Korea, we cannot pass along productivity gains to
workers wages and still be competitive.”
-
Stanley J. Michelick
Executive
Vice Pres.
Goodyear,
Inc.