Those unions that enjoy the right to strike have no guarantee that sacrificing their jobs and their livelihood will result in victory but they nevertheless engage in lengthy strikes, not because they are assured of winning but because they are determined to fight. William Burrus, 1998
The only effective answer to corporate greed is organised labor. Thomas Donahue
The problem with unions today is that there are not enough of them. Martin Johns, 2011
We have come too far – struggled too long – sacrificed too much and have too much left to do to allow that which we have achieved for the good of all to be swept away without a fight. And we have not forgotten how to fight. Lane Kirkland
Personally, I look forward to continuing the fight for justice and equality on the workroom floor. APWU will never – NEVER – allow heinous thinking by management to continue without a battle. It’s an atrocity which must be and will be stamped out. We are American workers and, most importantly, we are human beings! Moe Lepore, Boston Metro Area Local APWU 1985
Our struggle is the struggle of every working man and woman in America. We built this country, we have fought and died in its wars, paid our taxes and built every road and building in it from one coast to the other. And all we’ve asked in return is a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Moe Lepore, 2010
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose. Don Marquis
Only through a union built on real union principles can we hope to win real economic justice. Richard Myers
As it has over the decades, the union movement stands for the fundamental moral values that make America strong: quality education for our children, affordable health care for every person – not just some – an end to poverty, secure pensions and wages that enable families to sustain the middle-class life that has fuelled this nation’s prosperity and strength. Union members and other working family activists don’t just vote our moral values – we live them. We fight for them, day in, day out. Our commitment to economic and social justice propels us and everything we do. John Sweeney, November 2004
Then she lay down in the street
Right before the horse’s feet
Expecting with a patient eye
Murder Fraud and Anarchy ...
Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day ...
From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain and weep for cold ...
And that slaughter to the nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like oppression’s thundered doom,
Ringing through each heart and brain
Heard again, again, again –
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many. They are few. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
We know that the organised workers of the country are our friends. As for the rest, they don’t matter a tinker’s cuss. Emanuel Shinwell, speech 8th May 1947
I don’t believe that anybody in the trade union movement wins anything at all without being militant. You get as much as you are prepared to take. Arthur Scargill
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. Arthur Scargill
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. Arthur Scargill
There can be no escaping the fact that our great industrialised nations simply cannot do without trade unions. Jack Jones, lecture
Workers of the Clyde – you must prepare for action. Willy Gallagher
The problem was they intended to close the yards ... Us shop stewards we took a decision that we were going to fight to keep the shipyards on the Clyde. Sammy Barr, shop steward UCL & ship-building industry
I mean if they don’t like making cars, why don’t they get themselves another bloody job designing cathedrals, or composing violin concertos? The British Leyland Concerto in four movements, all of them slow, with a four-hour tea-break in between. I’ll tell you why: because they’re not interesting in anything apart from lounging about on conveyor belts stuffing themselves with my money. Fawlty Towers, Basil to dead man in bed
The prim building with its thick carpets was built for tidy and genteel officials with tidy and genteel routines. It has suddenly become the central powerhouse of the steel strike. As with the miners’ strike exactly eight years ago, the motivating power behind the action has shifted to South Yorkshire ...
A great tussle is already joined between the powerhouses at places like Rotherham and Stocksbridge and the slow-witted pessimism in many other steel areas. Paul Foot, The Rotherham Lads Are Here! 1980
The working-class movement is not broken, as it was for instance in the 1930s. But ordinary trade union organisation has deteriorated out of all recognition.
The collapse of trade union standards on the shop floor started early during the last Labour government with the TUC’s collaboration with the government on wages. The crossing of picket lines, previously unthinkable, became commonplace. The pace of disintegration has quickened in the past two and a half years. Even in well-organised workplaces it is now quite common to find no volunteers for stewards’ positions. The percentage of stewards who go on to be supervisors and managers is also on the increase. This disintegration has spread upwards through the movement, leading to a general mood of surrender and despair that would have been unimaginable ten years ago. Paul Foot, 3 Letters to a Bennite, 1981
The simple fact remains that in a divided society which is based on the exploitation of working people, the main battleground is at the point of production. That is where the wealth is produced. That is where the workers can most effectively hit back. It is where our collective strength and common interest combine most effectively. It is also, incidentally, the area where the Tories and employers behave most true to type, relentlessly and viciously, and where they can expect their behaviour to be studiously ignored by all the press and television.
... All of this was, in every case, countered by the quite extraordinary change which came over the workers involved. They grew ten feet tall, unimaginably more able and more resolute than they were in normal working conditions. Often the worst reactionaries on the shop floor became the mainstream of the pickets. Above all, when usually under our influence, the strikers moved out of their isolated dispute and sought help in the broader movement, they started to learn for the first time what being a trade unionist meant. The slogans ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ or ‘knowledge is power’ or ‘arise ye workers’, which they had seen before only on trade union banners, suddenly came to life. ibid.
Where there is no union the Thatcherite chargehand who believes that by some divine right he is empowered to lord it over the workers reigns supreme.
A trade union with proper negotiating rights enables the workers to collect together in places and at meetings from which the boss is excluded, and makes it far easier for them to discuss and take action to preserve not only their pay and conditions but their basic dignities as human beings. Paul Foot, Offensive to the Bullies
Then I read Blair’s Times article. As the sentences unfolded, the headline seemed to stand on its head. Blair’s ‘offensive’ was not against the Tory union bashers – it was against the unions. ibid.
Under the Tories, the judges have been viciously opposed to trade unions and Labour councils. Many of the decisions to sequester the miners’ union funds during the great strike of 1984-85 were extremely suspect, even in Tory law. When, partly in protest against Murdoch’s union busting at Wapping, Labour controlled Derbyshire County Council decided by democratic vote to move its advertising for teachers away from the Murdoch owned Times Education Supplement to The Guardian, the Tories took the case to the High Court where the judges denounced it as contrary to natural justice and ordered the people’s money to be poured back into Murdoch’s coffers ...