It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it.
--
On the ITV's Weekend World (4 April, 1976).Michael Foot
Mill sought to strengthen his defence of trade unions not by denying their possible monopoly effects, but by an appeal to the principle of laisser faire itself. To prevent the formation of corporate unions was, he thought, to interfere with a right obviously included in the general rule of freedom of contract.
Eric Roll
Pandit Ami Chandra was Fiji's most distinguished Indian trade unionist, possessing high intelligence and a quiet but convincing personality. He strongly opposed any participation of the trade unions in politics; and he also used his powers of gentle persuation to bring about multi-racial trade unionism.
Ami Chandra
We are asked to permit a hundred men to go round to the house of a man who wishes to exercise the common law right in this country to sell his labour where and when he chooses, and to 'advise' him or 'peacefully persuade' him not to work. If peaceful persuasion is the real object, why are a hundred men required to do it? ... Every honest man knows why trade unions insist on the right to a strong numerical picket. It is because they rely for their objects neither on peacefulness nor persuasion. Those whom they picket cannot be peacefully persuaded. They understand with great precision their own objects, and their own interests, and they are not in the least likely to be persuaded by the representatives of trade unions, with different objects and different interests. But, though arguments may never persuade them, numbers may easily intimidate them. And it is just because argument has failed, and intimidation has succeeded, that the Labour Party insists upon its right to picket unlimited in respect of numbers.
F. E. Smith
Indeed, in the terrible history of famines world is hard to find a case where there has been famine in a country having a free press and active opposition within a democratic institutional framework. [...] The negative freedom of the press and opposition parties to criticize, write and organize the protest can be extremely effective in safeguarding freedom positive elementary population more vulnerable. (Chapter 1.3, pp. 15-16)
Amartya Sen
Foot, Michael
Foote, Samuel
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