Laboring Class Quotes

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn’t get.”
― William "Big Bill" Haywood

“Caligula wished that the Roman people had but one neck that he might cut it off, and as I read this letter I am afraid that for a moment I was capable of wishing the same thing concerning the laboring class of America.”
― Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

“The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.”
― Sarah N. Cleghorn

“In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it's not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they've chosen to demonize. It's all about class, not age. It's 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“The great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans.”
― Mary L. Gray, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass

“The occupants of the other three looked like the people they had seen rioting in the streets of Paris that morning. They were citizens of the other France, the France one didn’t read about in guidebooks. They were the put-upon and the left-behind, the ones without glittering degrees from elite institutions of learning. Globalization and automation had eroded their value in the workforce. The service economy was their only option. Their counterparts in Britain and America had already had their say at the ballot box. France, reckoned Gabriel, would be next.”
― Daniel Silva, The New Girl

“The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.”
― Karl Marx

“The real struggle is for organization and not for the program after organization is completed. This is the revolutionary significance of the labor movement. Its program is achieved if it has complete or anywhere nearly complete organization.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]