Workers Councils Quotes

Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees. ~ Ernest Mandel

By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt describes as "the revolutionary heritage") does not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical society. Workers' councils originate as class councils. Unless one assumes that workers are driven by their interests as workers to revolutionary measures against hierarchical society (an assumption I flatly deny), then these councils can be used just as much to perpetuate class society as to destroy it. We shall see, in fact, that the council form contains many structural limitations which favor the development of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of workers' councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic entities, either as workers or nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness of the self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcated being, the product of a social development that divides man from man and each man from himself.
Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected by demands for workers' management of production and the shortening of the work week, for these demands leave the nature of the work process and the quality of the worker's free time completely untouched. If workers' councils and workers' management of production do not transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, and the workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures, in fact, cla ~ Murray Bookchin

The IRS says it wants to make sure companies can give their employees a choice between a new cash balance plan and the traditional defined benefit plan. The real question here is whether companies should be required to give their workers that choice. ~ Bernie Sanders

In prosperous times, the marginal workers get by. But in tough times, they get the shaft. ~ Bill O'Reilly

But most accounts agree that the residence workers' devotion to President George H. W. Bush was more than customary - it was genuine, almost profound. The Bushes were generally easy to please, and the residence workers found themselves quickly at ease with them. ~ Kate Andersen Brower

One day I was watching these construction workers go back to work. I was watching them kind of trudging down the street. It was like a revelation to me. I realized these guys don't want to go back to work after lunch. But they're going. That's their job. If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job I should be able to do the same. Trudge your ass in. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea. ~ Milan Kundera

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes  -  train and sprint, then rest and reassess. ~ Naval Ravikant

Ronald Reagan was long thought to be the most conservative of Republicans. And by any standard today he is the most popular Republican in modern history. Yet he raised taxes 11 times, supported a ban on assault rifles and the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks, and established amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers. ~ Mark McKinnon

When you see people that lived their purpose and sacrificed, who are everyday people - teachers, sanitation workers, and just people from all walks of life - that said, "I'm standing up for what I believe in. I'm standing up for my community." That reaffirms what you can do. ~ Common

The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships - i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences. ~ Vaclav Havel

Where do people get off telling people what to do? It's their bodies. If you legalized sex work and legally protected the sex workers, you wouldn't see anything like human trafficking. All of that would be obliterated. ~ Margaret Cho

Since Social Security faces a large gap between what it promises younger workers and what it can afford to pay them, private savings will likely need to play a larger role in retirement planning for younger workers. ~ Ron Lewis

Two new workers are being added to the population for every one job that is created. ~ Bob Beauprez

History speaks pretty clearly that the markets do better with Democrats. Republicans' ideas of what constitutes fiscal responsibility simply are not good for the stock market. Democrats have many tendencies, but one of them is to look after the workers, and actually that tends to be good for demand and good for markets. ~ Jeremy Grantham

Workers are actually being starved on the largest military base in Baghdad, and women are being raped with impunity - and because it doesn't fit into a Hollywood context it's not going to fly. ~ Sarah Stillman

What we want is a society without exploitation and oppression and I don't see how McDonalds can have any part to play in that- they're based on oppression and exploitation of workers, animals and the environment.. ~ Helen Steele

Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping. ~ Steve Brouwer

Ability for stupendous toil is lodged in every human spirit, a grand gift from the God of nature; but only the persevering worker knows what this latent power is able to achieve. ~ Elias Lyman Magoon

By encouraging its citizens to violate our border, Mexico is pushing a tremendous welfare burden off of its shoulders and onto ours, while also benefiting from the significant sums of U.S. currency that these workers will eventually send back home to their families. ~ Spencer Bachus

President Bush said that American workers will need new skills to get the new jobs in the 21st century. Some of the skills they're going to need are Spanish, Chinese, Korean, because that's where the jobs went. Who better than Bush as an example of what can happen when you take a job without any training. ~ Jay Leno

It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown ... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success. ~ Alice Foote MacDougall

The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them. ~ Clara Zetkin

I'll tell ya this: I come from an educated family. My father was an attorney representing blue collar workers, and my uncle was a chemical engineer ... on my mom's side, all my uncles were engineers - all ten of them. ~ Joe Piscopo

Let me repeat, if someone has the means to pay you and simply does not, they do not deserve your business. In fact, it is no longer a business transaction. I believe the term would be slavery. God clearly states that the deceptive actions of these people are a sin. Leviticus, 19:13 says, "You must not cheat your neighbor or rob him. You must not keep a hired worker's salary all night until morning. ~ V.L. Thompson

When recruiters, co-workers, old classmates, and other people Google your name and click on a link to you on LinkedIn, your profile page is what they will see. They'll learn about your work history, education, skills, interests, reputation, and other details you provide. It's like your own 'Who's Who' entry on LinkedIn. ~ Melanie Pinola

the income of nonwage workers is "mixed," because it combines income from labor with income from capital. This is also referred to as "entrepreneurial income. ~ Thomas Piketty

In the final analysis, poverty means death: lack of food and housing, the inability to attend properly to health and education needs, the exploitation of workers, permanent unemployment, the lack of respect for one's human dignity, and unjust limitations placed on personal freedom in the areas of self-expression, politics, and religion. ~ Gustavo Gutierrez

Not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone ... workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day. ~ Arthur Scargill

If you bring [tax] rates down, it makes it easier for small business to keep more of their capital and hire people. And for me, this is about jobs. I want to get America's economy going again. Fifty-four percent of America's workers work in businesses that are taxed as individuals. So when you bring those rates down, those small businesses are able to keep more money and hire more people. ~ Mitt Romney

A guest worker program should help farmers who are willing to pay a fair wage for law-abiding, dependable workers - not punish them ... And for this reason I support replacing the H-2A program and implementing new policies that will bring our illegal agricultural workers out of the shadows, as a first step in the process of overhauling our nation's immigration system. ~ Bob Goodlatte

If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone - perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers' bottom lines. ~ Christina Romer

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.

Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.

(The Earth in Space and Time §1) ~ H.G. Wells

Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market. ~ Noam Chomsky

Living in low-income neighborhoods, I've seen sexual health campaigns aimed at slut-shaming us into celibacy. They talk about things like self-esteem and value and all the usual abstinence arguments. They assume that our bodies are a gift that we should bestow selectively on others, rather than the one thing that can never be anything but our own. Even if we do share it, it is ours irrevocably.
These are the bodies that hold the brains we're supposed to shut off all day at work, the same bodies that aren't important enough to heal. These are the bodies that come with the genitalia that we should be so protective of? I really don't understand the logic.
You can't tell us that our brains and labor and emotions are worth next to nothing and then expect us to get all full of intrinsic worth when it comes to our genitals. Either we're cheap or we're not.
Make up your fucking mind. ~ Linda Tirado

That night the Salt Fish Girl came back looking exhausted and dishevelled. A Malaysian girl who worked at her factory had been stricken with hysteria, had gone to the toilet and begun screaming and tearing at her hair. She had been working at the factory for nearly three years and was half blind and bored out of her wits with the tedious repetitiveness of the work. Her hysteria had provoked others, until half the women in the factory were screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and once bright faces. ~ Larissa Lai

An industry that cannot pay its workers a decent living wage has no right to exist. ~ Fiorello H. La Guardia

And we are giddy, because dawn is here, we're at the center of the world and we're at the center of our own universe, and spring is here, and the air smells wet and clean. God bless Manhattan, you know, because it must be six in the morning on a Sunday yet trash collection trucks are teeming down the street and Times Square workers in their bright-orange uniforms are cleaning up the night's excesses and not even the smell of fresh spring rain can completely wash away Eau de Times Square Urine/Trash/Vomit, but somehow this here, this now, it feels perfect. ~ Rachel Cohn

Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net. ~ Richard Attias