The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.
--
Gompers, Samuel. "Not Even Compulsory Benevolence Will Do." The American Federationist. January 1917, p. 47.Samuel Gompers
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"This is a challenge to the entire trade union movement in Ireland - a declaration of war on the wages and working conditions of all workers."
Joe Higgins
In fact, it would be very easy to ‘prove’ Marx’s analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops, the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by consumer goods becomes (and the greater becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers’ own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers’ associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production), then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication.
Ernest Mandel
After retaining power for two months and ten days, the workers of Paris, who for the first time in history established the Commune, the embryo of Soviet power, perished at the hands of the French Cadets, Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries of a Kaledin type. The French workers had to pay an unprecedentedly heavy price for the first experience of workers' government, the meaning and purpose of which the overwhelming majority of the peasants in France did not know.
Vladimir Lenin
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.
Ronald Reagan
Employers crave the power to fire workers whose performance is judged inferior-not just to get rid of those particular workers, but more importantly to motivate and discipline the rest of the workforce.
Jim Stanford
Gompers, Samuel
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