Samuel Gompers Quotes About Labor

Quotes about: Labor

• Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

  Samuel Gompers

  Respect, Rights, Organization

• 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, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.

  Samuel Gompers

  Beautiful, Revenge, Book

  The Shoe workers' Journal, Volume 16‎ (p. 4), 1915.

• The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.

  Samuel Gompers

  Commodity, Commerce, Articles

  Samuel Gompers (1925). “Organized labor...”

• You can't do it unless you organize.

  Samuel Gompers

  Organized Labor, Unions, Labor Union

• Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.

  Samuel Gompers

  Men, Race, Labor Day

• All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Dayis devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.

  Samuel Gompers

  Holiday, Men, Race

• W.Z. Foster {head of the American Communist Party}, who had no money, went to Moscow and came back and announced that he was building a great secret machine to undermine the American labor movement and turn it over to the Red International, owned by Lenin. He began publication of an expensive magazine and proclaimed 'a thousand secret agents in a thousand communities.'

  Samuel Gompers

  Party, Community, Secret

• 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.

  Samuel Gompers

  Exercise, Here And There, Doe

  Samuel Gompers, John McBride, William Green (1919). “The American Federationist”

• So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service, we have sustained our forward progress, and we have made our labor movement something to be respected and accorded a place in the councils of the Republic. Where we have blundered into trying to force a policy or decision, even though wise and right, we have impeded if not interrupted the realization of our own aims.

  Samuel Gompers

  Wise, Long, Decision

  Samuel Gompers, John McBride, William Green (1948). “The American Federationist”

• [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

  People, Movement, Determined

  Proceedings of the Convention, Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor (p. 37), 1923.

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