Trade Unions Quotes

“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“The pot that had simmered for fifty years boiled over. Colliers and miners, furnacemen and tram-road labourers were flooding down the valley to the Chartists' rendezvous: men from Dowlais under the Guests, Cyfartha under the Crawshays, Nantyglo under Bailey and a thousand forges and bloomeries in the hills: men of the farming Welsh, the Staffordshire specialists and the labouring Irish were taking to arms.”
― Alexander Cordell, Rape of the Fair Country

“It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoise. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoise rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.”
― James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play

“The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.”
― James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play

“The first principles upon which the Paris working-men agreed with the British trade-unionists and Owenites, when they met in 1862 and 1864, at London, was that "the emancipation of the working-men must be accomplished by the working-men themselves.”
― Piotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“When we arrived in government, Labour party members both inside and outside the trade union movement were as ecstatic as everyone else. We could have captured and built on that feeling much more if the style had been more inclusive from the beginning. Being seen to do more to listen would have made us stronger, and helped us to move forward.”
― Mo Mowlam, Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and the People

“But trade-unionism lives not only in organizations but in the hearts of men.”
― Ellen Wilkinson, The Town that Was Murdered

“In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Capital's mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine. Especially in the UK, the traditional representatives of the working class - union and labor leaders - found Fordism rather too congenial; its stability of antagonism gave them a guaranteed role. But this meant that it was easy for the advocates of post-Fordist Capital to present themselves as the opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized labor 'pointlessly' invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented. Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“The evolution of Polak's ideas had a great deal to do with the fact that he was a Jew. Like Jews elsewhere, those in Amsterdam kept a low profile; they were predominantly workers, and so they were attracted to the socialist program of fairness and decency. But they were deeply repelled by the idea of revolution. They knew from centuries of experience which group would become the scapegoat if things turned out badly. Polak read widely and while in England was influenced by the Fabian Society, which promoted a moderate path between socialism and capitalism. He cofounded the Dutch diamond worker's union (whose members were overwhelmingly Jewish) and became its chairman. From that perch he was able to put his ideas into practice. He wanted not only decent housing for workers but something more: beauty, a genuinely good life.”
― Russel Shorto