Labour Quotes

“The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.”
― Charles Moore

“It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“Be a worthy worker and work will come.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.”
― Michael Hureaux-Perez

“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“You got the eggs in you; the world is fully ready to celebrate the chicks out of your laying labour. Never give up. Go and breed! Go and breed great dreams.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Don't think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“As the sun shines I will make hay
To keep failure at bay
For there remaineth a pay
For my honest toil each day.”
― Ogwo David Emenike

“Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.”
― Émile Zola, Paris

“Let these men sing out their songs,
they've been walking all day long,
all their fortune's spent and gone...
silver dollar in the subway station;
quarters for the papers for the jobs.”
― Roman Payne

“The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but "servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds," who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable," he wrote. "It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith's view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. (p. 64)”
― Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought

“Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism--that to live and work *for an idea*is man's calling, and according to the faithfulness its fulfilment his *human worth* is measured”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Spend sleepless nights pursuing your dreams rather than on things that take you far from them. This will allow you to relish the fruits of your labour in your later years.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Exploring the Explosive Power of Big Dreams

“AI Cannot take our jobs”
many people say,
“It is not smart enough
to do our jobs” they insist.
Thus they talk
’cause they still don’t know
how dumb will be
their future jobs.”
― Herold Vesperi, The Age of the Button Pushers

“Newspapers as a whole are hostile to organized labor, and the public is therefore suspicious of organized labor whenever it moves to implement its rights. Whether the hostility be open or covert, it is nevertheless a notorious fact that all the effective efforts of labor to better its precarious economic position are misrepresented by the newspapers.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“Scientific management, so-called, is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises. It lacks the characteristics of a true science because its assumptions reflect nothing more than the outlook of the capitalist with regard to the conditions of production. It starts, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, not from the human point of view but from the capitalist point of view, from the point of view of the management of a refractory work force in a setting of antagonistic social relations. It does not attempt to discover and confront the cause of this condition, but accepts it as an inexorable given, a “natural” condition. It investigates not labor in general, but the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital.”
― Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

“He had a face like the north face of the Eiger by the time we’d got to the bit where the three wise men were reviled as capitalist pigs. He took Miss Elf into the showers and had a ‘Quiet Word’. We all heard every word he shouted. He said he wanted to see a traditional Nativity play, with a Tiny Tears doll playing Jesus and three wise men dressed in dressing gowns and tea towels. He threatened to cancel the play if Mary, alias Pandora, continued to go into simulated labour in the manger. This is typical of Scruton, he is nothing but a small-minded, provincial, sexually-inhibited fascist pig. How he rose to become a headmaster I do not know. He has been wearing the same hairy green suit for three years”
― Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4

“Bodies of labour.
Organs of effort. Put together.
Sometimes I wonder if the insides of me are as dark as the universe.”
― Devika Todi

“If he is a worker, the ubiquitous fact of unemployment teaches him that the supply of labour is always greater than the demand.”
― Brealey & Myers, Principles of Corporate Finance

“We dislike labour because it makes us experience the day on terms that are not our own.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“If you were to succeed without sweating, you would never understand your value. If you work hard and persist, you will appreciate the fruits of your labour.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Kind of Substance You Need For Your Success

“Work expands to fill the intelligence available, human or artificial (Parkinson's Law codicil)”
― Larrie D. Ferreiro

“Every movement, every load, every breath behind a dusty windshield is a human act.”
― Bruno Petosa, No Operator on Board: Pushback

“Sophistications’ labour bounds, surrounds:
As language’d commerce, industry expounds (p. 25).”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth, Incipiencies: A Primitiae of Poetry

“A betrayal! You, young warriors, sought to undo me while I laboured in peace?”
― Sonia George, Blindman's Bluff

“Nil sine magno labore vita dedit mortalibus”
― Horace

“While we live, we labour.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Indeed, the utopian nature of a market society cannot be better illustrated than by the absurdities in which the commodity fiction in regard to labor must involve the community. The strike, this normal bargaining weapon of industrial action, was more and more frequently felt to be a wanton interruption of socially useful work, which, at the same time, diminished the social dividend out of which, ultimately, wages must come. Sympathy strikes were resented, general strikes were regarded as a threat to the existence of the community. Actually, strikes in vital services and public utilities held the citizens to ransom while involving them in the labyrinthine problem of the true functions of a labor market. Labor is supposed to find its price on the market, any other price than that so established being uneconomical. As long as labor lives up to this responsibility, it will behave as an element in the supply of that which it is, the commodity "labor," and will refuse to sell below the price which the buyer can still afford to pay. Consistently followed up, this means that the chief obligation of labor is to be almost continually on strike. The proposition could not be outbidden for sheer absurdity, yet it is only the logical inference from the commodity theory of labor. The source of the incongruity of theory and practice is, of course that labor is not really a commodity, and that if labor was withheld merely in order to ascertain its exact price (just as an increase in supply of all other commodities is withheld in similar circumstances society would very soon dissolve for lack of sustenance.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“Práca, manuálna práca je jedinou cnosťou inak neporiadnych a nemorálnych ľudí, denný očistec, keď prichádzajú ráno špinaví a pripití z predchádzajúcej noci, no práca ich očistí, možno ich na pár hodín premení na nových ľudí, no po návrate domov sa stanú tým, čím boli, ak sa vôbec cez deň zmenili, pretože ani to sa nedarilo všetkým, nie všetci boli v práci poriadni, necítili sa posvätení ako na krste, často ich to nebavilo, čo bol jeden z dôvodov, prečo tak ľahko niektorí odovzdávali svoju pôdu do družstiev, chceli sa jej zbaviť, nechceli pracovať. Možno neboli leniví, no určite boli unavení, spoliehali sa, že ich vyčerpanosť sa rozpustí vo vyprahnutosti ostatných, že keď budú robiť všetci spolu málo, tak to bude stačiť aj na výplatu, aj na jedlo, aj na strechu, aj na pocit nového človeka.”
― Juraj Buzalka, Postsedliaci: Slovenský ľudový protest