Workingmen are at the foundation of society.
SAMUEL GOMPERSSo long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
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What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money
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No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.
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Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.
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Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop.
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Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
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Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
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We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.
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Show me the country that has no strikes and I’ll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
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You can’t do it unless you organize.
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The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.
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There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. That is his right. It is his legal right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right, and no one can or dare question his exercise of that legal right.
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The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.
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[The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves.
SAMUEL GOMPERS