Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I ran to get my cassette recorder and sang 'We Got the Beat' into the recorder to document it. I knew I had written something special. It took two minutes. I didn't labor on the lyrics. It's a simple song, which goes back to the '60s, when I had my ears glued to the radio for the Stones, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys.
I do think we need to hold countries accountable who violate trade agreements that are already in place. We need to get stronger about enforcement, that in the future if we strike a trade agreement, toughening up labor standards and environmental standards and enforcement standards is something we absolutely need to do.
From its onset, the labor movement has been at the forefront of the fight to improve working conditions and workplace safety. At the local level, knowing their union has their back gives workers the confidence and support they need to stand up and report harassment, poor working conditions, or workplace safety violations.
We hear much of Bolshevism, much of labor unrest; at times, we hear the word 'revolution.' But these are but contagious diseases in the body of civilization, and I believe that the antitoxins of good cheer, mutual confidence, fairness and justice will ultimately cure these ills and make the world healthy and strong again.
When you see a fashion show, you see those seven minutes of what was six months of tedious work of, you know, going up an inch and down an inch, changing it from one shade of red to another shade of red. So it's the same as any creative process. The result is what we see, but the process is really labor intensive and work.
In antiquity, agriculture and industry depended completely on human labor; but now, with the development of natural forces that human labor cannot match, agriculture and industry have fallen completely into the hands of the capitalists. The greater the amount of capital, the more abundant the resources that can be utilized.
Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict, which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision. Such is not the case in the slaveholding States.
Cheap labor is a small part of the problem at work here. If it were only cheap labor, America would be in trouble. Because it's other things, too, we have a great chance to turn it around. Here's the problem: Our high corporate tax rate pushes our companies offshore. Our high regulatory burden pushes our companies offshore.
If someone were to say that life at hard labor is as painful as death and therefore equally cruel, I should reply that, taking all the unhappy moments of perpetual slavery together, it is perhaps even more painful, but these moments are spread out over a lifetime, and capital punishment exercises all its power in an instant.
You would think that if any group in America had 20% to 25% unemployment, it would generate all kinds of attention. The Labor Department would understandably and necessarily begin to concentrate on what can we do to reduce this level of unemployment. Congress would give great time on the floor for debate on what can be done.
We know that freedom has many dimensions. It is the right of the man who tills the land to own the land; the right of the workers to join together to seek better conditions of labor; the right of businessmen to use ingenuity and foresight to produce and distribute without arbitrary interference in a truly competitive economy.
Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that.
We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials.
You gotta call it out first; it always has to be called out when we need social change, but this is how social change happens: you call it out. People had to call out child labor. People had to call out, 'Hey time's up; we need to vote. We live in this country.' People had to call out 'time's up' on enslaving people, you know.
One of the most effective tools in Brazil's efforts to eradicate slavery is a register compiled by the government that lists individuals and businesses found using slave labor. Those on the 'dirty list,' as the register is known, are fined and remain on it for a minimum of two years during which they cannot access public funds.
Hungary has no raw materials and no major energy sources; we have some agricultural background. So what we produce here in Hungary is the result of our labor and minds, and then we have to sell it to the world. If we are not able to do that, if we are not innovative enough, if we are not modern and open enough, we can't do that.
If you look at the beginning of this country, when the pilgrims came to this country, the first year they had a communistic experiment. They said, 'OK, we're going to take the land, we're going to work the land together and share in the fruits of our labor.' They almost starved to death. Almost half of them died that first year.
Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.
It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.
Private sector labor market flows provide additional indications of the strength of the labor market. For example, the quits rate has tended to be pro-cyclical, since more workers voluntarily quit their jobs when they are more confident about their ability to find new ones and when firms are competing more actively for new hires.
You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism.
Monorail tracks are prefabricated and can be erected relatively quickly: Simply dig a hole every 120 feet or so, plop down a column, and lift the track into place. Because the systems operate above traffic, collisions with errant motorists are never an issue. The trains are automated, saving millions in labor costs in the long run.
For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.
The theme of the Labor Department's centennial is 'Then, Now, Next.' So in honoring Esther Peterson, we look not just to the past but to the future, acknowledging with honesty and a sense of purpose the lingering challenges we still face and the distance we've yet to travel before equality is truly a reality in the lives of all women.
As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.
Dr. King's last campaign was a labor struggle. Many people are aware that King was assassinated in Memphis in the spring of 1968. Less well-known is what drew him there: solidarity with city sanitation workers, who, without the benefit of union representation, were rising up to protest humiliating pay and deplorable working conditions.
Trump wants to take us back to a time when people like him could abuse others with little to no consequence, when people like him could exploit the labor of others to build vast amounts of wealth, when people like him could create public policy that specifically benefited them while suppressing the rights and social mobility of others.
Whether the struggle was between English merchants and the American colonies, pre Civil War northern manufacturers vs. southern slave holders, or American grain farmers and auto manufacturers seeking advantage in the Mexican agriculture and labor markets in the 1990s, U.S. policy has reflected the economic clash of interests of the day.
A man who is without capital, and who, by prohibitions upon banking, is practically forbidden to hire any, is in a condition elevated but one degree above that of a chattel slave. He may live; but he can live only as the servant of others; compelled to perform such labor, and to perform it at such prices, as they may see fit to dictate.
I believe if an individual wants to join organized labor and work under a union contract, they should have the legal right to do so. At the same token, a person who does not want to work under organized labor and wants to work should have the ability to do so without the threat of having to join and having to pay dues to organized labor.
I conclude where I began, I was elected by the people of Australia to do a job. I was not elected by the factional leaders of Australia, of the Australian Labor Party to do a job - though they may be seeking to do a job on me, that's a separate matter. The challenge therefore is to honour the mandate given to me by the Australian people.
I call myself the hardware shelf. There's a lot of awards and honors there. And I have earned that. I didn't ask for it, I didn't beg for it, I didn't pay for it. I earned that. People see the accomplishments - but it's good to remind people that so much strife and labor and tears and heartbreak came before that, that it really is earned.
Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.
Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.
The first Friday of every month is what we call Numbers Day - it's the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report. We have a ritual at the Labor Department - at 8 A.M., we gather around a table in my office, and the commissioner of labor statistics briefs me and the department's senior leadership on the numbers.
In the 1970s, we got a Labor government that put more emphasis on trade with Asia; the Vietnam war ended, and refugees were coming in. We were more part of Asia than America and the rest of the world. There was the proximity, for a start - all these countries and cultures just north of us. It just made sense that that's what we were part of.
When you work extra, you should be paid extra. That's what the Fair Labor Standards Act said. And I've met so many people who are working 60-70 hours a week, and they are effectively working 20 hours for free because they are making a little bit above the minimum wage, because the 2004 regulation enables employers to do that. That's not fair.
Throughout my career as a lawyer, teacher and labor leader, books have remained my constant companion - stuffed into a briefcase, overflowing on my bedside table, stacked on my desk at work. Books have carried me to distant worlds, opened new doors and made me feel empathy, compassion, anger, fear, joy, acceptance - and everything in between.
The fruits of the economy and all the advantages of technology and globalization have gone far more to the investor class and the professional class and not as much to the working class. Partly because of the loss of labor unions, partly because of things like a lack of antitrust enforcement, policies that have privileged shareholder returns.
For small community banks and credit unions, like those in Central and Northern Wisconsin, the hundreds of new rules will require an estimated 2,260,631 labor hours just for compliance. Those are hours that your local bank or credit union will spend dealing with some Washington bureaucrat instead of focusing on the needs of customers like you.
President Trump was determined to replace NAFTA from the day he took office. It reflected the old way of trade deals in which our partners shirked labor protections while American companies shipped operations and jobs to cheaper foreign locations. Our factories shuttered, our manufacturing shrank, and we grew more dependent on foreign suppliers.
Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as 'socialist.' Yet, these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.
It's usually much easier for people with professional skills to find work for themselves or even possibly to continue with their old employer, but on a part-time basis. Some labor economists predict that in about five years there will be a labor shortage in the United States and that demand for retirees to work part-time will grow naturally. I don't know if that's true or just wishful predicting.
There's one last thing we need to point out. And it is a fact that Puerto Rico is a colonial territory of the United States. This puts us in a very significant disadvantage to all of the other states and to all of the other American citizens. As a matter of comparative, the U.S. citizens, the Puerto Ricans that live in the United States have much better incomes, more than twice as much, participate in the labor force of greater scales, have better results in the education system and so forth.
