You can’t do it unless you organize.
SAMUEL GOMPERSWe 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.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
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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.
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In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.
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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.
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No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.
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The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
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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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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.
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Workingmen are at the foundation of society.
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Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.
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To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.
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The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
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To be free, the workers must have choice. To have choice they must retain in their own hands the right to determine under what conditions they will work.
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Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning found inside the lion
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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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Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
SAMUEL GOMPERS