Trade Unions Quotes

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.

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

By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights the right to belong to a free trade union.

It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

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.

Trade unions have been an essential force for social change, without which a semblance of a decent and humane society is impossible under capitalism.

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

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

I can’t help to spit nails when just thinking about Trade Unions

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they’re quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.

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.

All the evidence shows very clearly that if you are a member of a trade union you are likely to get better pay, more equal pay, better health and safety, more chance to get training, more chance to have conditions of work that help if you have caring responsibilities … the list goes on!

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.

People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement.

The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.

Hence, within the space of two generations there has been a complete revolution in the attitude of the trades-unions toward the women working in their trades.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If we want to make progress in key areas now, we have to build a multi-stakeholder process, harnessing the appropriate energies. So not only the politicians but also business, the wider civil society, and the trade union movement all have a contribution to make, whether it is at national or at international level.

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

The history of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land. America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life. We ought to be proud of it!

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.

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.

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.

The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted – or rather tend to be corrupted – by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

On the one hand the world is getting more integrated and we should not dismiss social values as “Western” when they are actually modern values. On the other hand, individual countries have their own history and their own evolution. Trade unions, for example, don’t play the same role in China as they do in Europe or the US.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The main difference lies in wage levels, which is because our workers are not yet as well trained as in other countries. We are a poor country. This is why we must accept the conditions that prevail in international markets. But our trade unions do represent the rights of workers.

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.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

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.

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

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.

I know that strong trade unions and best supported by Labour Government actually protect worker’s rights.

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.

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.

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.

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.

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.

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.

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.

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.