This is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in a sort of life, rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying.
Studs Terkel, actor and writer, 1974

Factory managers abuse and harass us because they think it will increase our productivity. They don't understand that people work better when they are treated in a way that respects their needs. You should do research into that.
Worker from a Nike sweatshop, 2002 (name witheld on request)

Management is far too important to leave to managers.
Paul Cochrane, NZ Public Service Association, 2001

The things we admire... kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest: sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success.
John Steinbeck, US novelist

If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.
Friedrich Herzberg, management guru, 1963

Workers who belong to trade unions earn higher wages, work fewer hours, receive more training, and have longer job tenure on average, than their non-unionized counterparts .... At the macroeconomic level, high unionization rates lead to lower inequality of earnings and can improve economic performance.
The World Bank(!!), 2003

The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Peter Drucker

The future is not set. There is no fate but that we make ourselves.
Sarah Connor in Terminator 2

The fundamental purpose of a business is not to make money. Rather, it is to achieve sustained, profitable growth. To achieve growth, we must have innovation; we need to do things differently. And innovation is a bottom up process... coming from the people closest to the work.
Praveen Gupta, management consultant and author

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.
Stephen Jay Gould

Workers (now) own... the critical means of production. In a modern company 70 to 80% of what people do is now done by way of their intellects. The critical means of production is small, gray, and weighs around 1.3 kilogrammes. It is the human brain.
J Ridderstrale and K Nordstrom, analysts of everything, 2003

We still have a lot of work to do when it comes to democracy. We have political democracy but not economic democracy.
Danish worker, unionist and ex-Prime Minister Anker Jørgensen

  Market and democracy clash at the fundamental level.  Democracy runs on the principle of 'one man (one person), one vote.' The market runs on the principle of 'one dollar, one vote.'
Ha-Joon Chang, economist, consultant to the World Bank

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right.

Things undreamt of are daily being seen, the impossible is ever becoming possible. We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.
Mahatma Gandhi

National unions have dealt with national companies. To deal with international companies you need international unions.
Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of UK union Unite

Partnership without strong, effective unions is meaningless, while organising is not an end in itself.
Paul Nowak, TUC National Organiser, 2006

'Workers of the world, unite!' isn't ideological anymore. It's practical.

We're going through the most profound, the most transformative economic revolution any generation has ever experienced. You either change to make history, or stick to the status quo and become history.

Capital went global; trade went global; finance went global. It's impossible for unions to stay local or regional.

Asking our employers to make the choice of cooperation or confrontation is a dramatic paradigm shift.
Andy Stern, SEIU President

New unionism organizing styles not only increase membership density within multinationals, but also create an incentive for management to deal more honestly with unions on a global basis.
Paul Garver, global union campaig organizer, ex IUF, 2007

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intellingent, but the ones most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin

One social skill that must be learned is that other people have points of view that are not only different, but threatening, to your own. In turn, your opinions may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation. Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you can still have a meaningful conversation with them. The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills.
Nick Szabo

I believe that the future of successful workplace design can be defined as how you treat your employees — in other words, the overall employee experience... I believe that the future of work is ALL about design, and more specifically democratic design.
Yves Behar, CEO of fuseproject

The challenge to unions is to embark on union - management cooperative ventures with an independent agenda, grounded in the needs of members. Globalization has raised the stakes for unions in getting the balance between cooperation and conflict just right.
Corliss Olson, School for Workers, University of Wisconsin, USA

The degree to which workers' health is protected in our society always reflects the value we attribute to human existence itself.
Guy Ryder, International Trade Union Confederation

If a man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar! 

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
Abraham Lincoln

Our task is not to create a movement from scratch. Our task is to recognise the movement we already have.
Naomi Klein, writer on globalisation and corporate culture, 2000

A leader is best
When people hardly know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him....
But of a good leader, who talks little
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, "We did this ourselves."
Martin Buber, 1957

It would appear to be self-evident that if business and capital go global, then... labour should follow suit.
Andreas Breitenfellner; International Labour Review

You can tell a company by the people they keep.
Anon

It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world. It's the troubles that cause the rebels.
Carl Oglesby, Students for a Democratic Society

Don't believe everything you think!
Bumper sticker and motto of labor cartoonist "Bobbo" Simpson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson, US author and lecturer (also often attributed to Nelson Mandela)

The idea of international solidarity, as good as it sounds, means nothing unless you can develop specific actions.

Friends, global offshoring is a reality. We need Global Union Alliances to ensure rights are respected at home and at the destination.
Philip Jennings, General Secretary UNI

It is no longer possible to protect workers' rights in one country, while in the neighbouring countries with whom we trade, workers face exploitation and sweatshop conditions. The fight for workers' rights in one country has to be a fight for workers' rights in every country.
Sharan Burrow, ITUC President, 2007

The first step to better times is to imagine them. 
Chinese fortune cookie

Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of the right to join the union of their choice.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us... They are adults. We trust them... We get out of their way and let them do their jobs... We recognise the renewing power of unions and the importance of not becoming ostriches... The era of using people as production tools is coming to an end. Participation is infinitely more complex to practice than conventional corporate unilateralism, just as democracy is much more cumbersome than dictatorship. But there will be few companies that can afford to ignore either of them.
Ricardo Semler, Brazilian CEO of SEMCO, 1993 (see the SEMCO workplace democracy story under success stories)

The US retailer Nordstrom has an employee handbook that consists of only one rule: “Use your good judgment in all situations – there will be no additional rules.”

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
Walt Kelly, spoken by his cartoon character Pogo

The Iron Rule is: never, ever do for anybody what he or she can do for themselves.
Saul Alinsky, American community activist, 1909-1972

What does it mean to be a revolutionary who is not trying to stage a revolution? It is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new.
Subcomandante "Marcos", masked leader of Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army

Organizing is a fancy word for relationship building.
Ernesto Cortes, co-founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation

The American labor movement has consistently demonstrated its devotion to the public interest. It is, and has been, good for all America.
John F. Kennedy

Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.
St. Augustine

If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union.
Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882-1945, 32nd US President.
The sculpture to the left is from the Roosevelt Memorial.

Success is a journey, not a destination.
Vince Lombardi

For every thousand chopping at the branches of evil, only one is chopping at the roots.
H.D Thoreau

The movement is lava rumbling under the earth, always there. But sometimes it breaks through, and then anything can happen, and the surface is forever changed.
Kim Fellner, US author and co-founder of the National Organisers Alliance

Long ago we stated the reason for labour organizations. We said that a union was essential to give labourers opportunity to deal on an equality with their employers.
US Supreme Court

Campaigns for social justice have almost invariably tended to pursue justice one country at a time. Now with the advent of globalization, it's no longer that simple. We have to achieve justice everywhere at once in order to achieve it anywhere at all.
Andy Stern, SEIU President, 2006

...genuine partnership working gives employees... an influence over management decision-making – from the ‘glint in the eye’ of generating ideas – through the ‘what’ of proposals – to the ‘how’ of implementation.
John Kirkham, the Work Foundation, 2006

Corporations are powerful only because we allow them to be... Our strength lies in our citizenship, in our ability to engage in democratic politics. This means putting the demo back in democracy.
George Monbiot, political journalist, 2000

Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Ghandi

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself
and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.

Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his (sic) interests.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

The modern Conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy - that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist

You say the little efforts that I make will do no good; they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in balance. I don't think I ever thought they would, but I am prejudiced beyond debate in favour of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.
Tommy Douglas, 1960

A meagre 1.5% of the worldwide labour force works outside its home country. In the EU the equivalent number is 2%.
G Mulgan, Harvard Business School, 1997

In an era of reform the demand for revolution becomes a badge of complacency.
Brian Kitchener, a nice guy

John Chambers of CISCO systems spends 80% of his time in conversation with customers, and requires every executive to speand at least 50% of their time face-to-face with customers.
P B Seybold, customer relations analyst, 2001

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot

Managers need to remember that most people join organisations, and leave managers.
M Buckingham and C Coffman, management theorists, 1999

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu

We economists have a responsibility to think more broadly about what a healthy economy might do for its participants. We need new metrics and new models.
U.S. economist economist Nancy Folbre, 2008

A precondition for a healthy society is to have an articulated image of the 'other future' - that tension between where we are now, and where we could be.
Seattle community planner Milenko Matanovic, 2008

It is not that humans have become more greedy than in the past generation... It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously.
Alan Greenspan, US Federal Reserve Chairman, 2003

Tehnological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has had great difficulty in generating joy.
Pope Paul VI, 1968

(US) union workers earn an average of $10.27 more per hour in total compensation than non union workers; thats $33.32 vs $23.15.
US Bureau of Labour Statistics June 2005 survey of labour costs

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Anais Nin, Novelist, feminist, philosopher, dancer

The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the making of them changes both the maker and the destination.
John Schaar, futurist, 1999

To work, to work. It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do!
Katherine Mansfield, 1916

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.
Henry Ford 1863-1947, Founder of Ford Motor Company

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
Studs Terkel, actor and writer, 1974

Work is not a curse, but drudgery is!
Henry Ward Beecher 1813-1887, US preacher, orator, writer

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, South African Prelate

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. We are faced now with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late…We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late".
Martin Luther King Jr, American leader, Nobel prize winner 1964

One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love... What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it.

Power is the abilityto achieve purpose. Whether it is good or bad depends on the purpose.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

...one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

...unionized manufacturing plants are 22% more productive than nonunion factories. By offering superior wages and benefits, unionized employers improve worker retention, thus reducing the time-consuming and costly process of hiring and training.12 Additionally, unions provide an avenue for the open exchange of information and ideas between workers and management. This communication is vital to fostering productivity and innovation, and it cannot occur in workplaces where employees fear retribution.
Professor Harley Shaiken, Center for American Progress, 2004

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it -not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.
W. H. Auden 1907-1973, Anglo-US poet

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
John Kenneth Galbraith 1908-, US economist

Men have become the tools of their trade.
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862, US essayist, poet, naturalist

...if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.
Bruce Grocott 1940-, British Labor politician

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
Don Marquis 1878-1937, US humorist and journalist

If there is one message from labor history for the future of unions, it is that if unionism manages to recover from the endangered species list it will be through a growth spurt associated with some new form or new mode of operating.
Richard B Freeman, Union commentator and Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on. Class analysis is knowing who is there with you.
Anonymous

In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.
George Orwell 1903-1950, British author, ''Animal Farm''

If you can laugh together, you can work together.
Robert Orben

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
John Cleese 1939-, British comedian, actor, writer

After all is said and done, a lot more will be said than done.
Unknown

...the work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine and oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
extract from Circles on the Water by poet Marge Piercy

It is not the impossible which gives cause for despair, but the failure to achieve the possible.
Louis Michel, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid

Don't get angry - get curious! Why are people taking the positions they are? Why are they angry? It's a good first step towards a solution.
ACAS conciliator's motto

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation. For when you come back to your work, your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work, you lose power of judgment. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.
Leonardo Da Vinci

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
Leon Trotsky 1879-1940

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C.S.Lewis

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, the revolutionary is motivated by great sentiments of love.
Ché Guevara

Every advance in this half-century: Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education... one after another- came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
US President Jimmy Carter

...the denial of creative involvement at work results in socially significant pathologies with an import far beyond the scope of the job itself.
Melvin Tumin, in Source Book for Creative Problem Solving

One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers... Paying high wages is behind the prosperity of this country.
Henry Ford 1863-1947, Founder of Ford Motor Company

Employees and employers need organizations that solve problems, not create them. In a fast-paced, competitive world... unions need to level the playing field for all employers, not by simply raising the cost of doing business for unionized ones alone.
Andy Stern, SEIU President, 2006

Speak Truth to Power
Eighteenth century Society of Friends (Quakers) slogan

When Hitler came for the Jews... I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned.
Pastor Martin Niemoller, Dachau, 1944

For effective social change to take place there must be a supportive system with values, institutions and propaganda that can stand up to and take the place of the prevailing culture. In other words, a counter culture.

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. (attributed)
Emma Goldman, anarchist and dancer

It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Emiliano Zapata

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
(Note: the original hand-written text ended on the phrase "the pursuit of property" rather than "the pursuit of Happiness". However the latter phrase has been accepted as replacing this.)
US Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776

I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler.
American singer and activist Paul Robeson

Stress has always been around, but now it has hit the elite and is therefore deemed a recent disease.
J Ridderstrale and K Nordstrom, analysts of everything, 2003

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
African Proverb

The best map in the world will not get you anywhere. Only going will get you there.
Anon

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Oscar Wilde, 1891, Irish playwright, poet and wit

By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
from the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1905

Bargain globally, boycott locally!
Bumper sticker

Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales.
Byron J. Langenfeld

No problem is solved via the same paradigm that created it.

Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Albert Einstein, German physicist, 1879-1955

Anger is meant to be acted on. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.
Julia Cameron, novelist, playwright, songwriter and poet

Partnership is built from below and thus can institutionalise the collective power of workers, rather than being an alternative to that power.
Prof Edmund Heery, academic advisor to the UK New Unionism project, 1999

The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera, Czech novelist

The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.
Bill Clinton, US President

All that matters is love and work.
Sigmund Freud, Austrian pyschoanalyst

Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should also govern it.
Wilhelm Reich, Austrian pyschoanalyst

A new world is about to be born. On a quiet day, you can hear her breathing.
Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy

When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?
Henry David Thoreau

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin

You can get everything you want if you help enough others get what they want.
Zig Ziglar

The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished once and for all.
George Bernard Shaw

The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
Booker T. Washington

Always remember that you're unique, just like everybody else.
Anonymous

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Benito Mussolini

At the extremes of the political spectrum one encounters people who are moved chiefly to find an outlet for the venom that is in them.
D. Sutten

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule.

The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war.
Rosa Luxembourg

The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves their freedom must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity, the heart of their hope...

Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he will never come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out you could be led back again. I would have you make up your own mind that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves.
Eugene Debs

Art is not a mirror to be held up to reality; it is a hammer with which to shape it.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Soviet poet, 1893-1930

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
Mark Twain

People ask me, "How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?" Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Employees shouldn't be sleeping in cubes to prove they're "passionate employees." The company should behave just like a good user interface -- support people in doing what they're trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way.
Kathy Freeman, ex games developer and "chief poobah" of Head First books

Every means tends to become an end. To understand the tragedy of human history it is necessary to grasp that fact. Machines which ought to be men's instrument, enslave him, the state enslaves society, the bureaucracy enslaves the state, the church enslaves religion, parliament enslaves democracy, institutions enslave justice, academies enslave art, the army enslaves the nation, the party enslaves the cause, the dictatorship of the proletariat enslaves Socialism. The choice and the control of the instruments of political action are thus at least as important as the choice of the ends themselves, and as time goes on the instruments must be expected to become an end for those who use them.
Ignazio Silone, Italian Novelist, 1939

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.
Dante

Only by fighting for democratic power do (workers) educate themselves up to the level of being able to wield that power.
Hal Draper

Be as radical as reality.
Vladimir Ilyich 'Lenin' Ulyanov

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.
Confucius

If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, we can walk together.
Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths
lead to the same goal: to convey to others
what we are. And we must pass through solitude
and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order
to reach forth to the enchanted place where
we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our
sorrowful song, but in this dance or in this song
are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience
in the awareness of being human and
believing in a common destiny.
Poet Pablo Neruda, from "ln the Splenclid City"

Such a thing as democracy in industry, love in industry, is possible -- and it is good business.

We could build up a great enterprise by making our workers comfortable, free of worry, whether in the factory or in their homes, by thinking of them as human beings, not machines to be run 'til they broke down and had to be scrapped; to make them as contented as we could with reason.

To be truly successful, truly constructive, truly great, you must know what is in the mind and in the heart of the worker. Wages alone, no matter how liberal, how fair, won't do it.
George F. Johnson, US industrialist, 1857-1948

(Johnson's workers were the first in the shoe industry to be given the 8-hour day/40-hour work week. He paid them wages that were 20 to 30 percent higher than the industry standard, and offered them profit sharing.)

We are a movement that builds, not destroys.

We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live.

The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.

I am an organizer, not a union leader. A good organizer has to work hard and long. There are no shortcuts. You just keep talking to people, working with them, sharing, exchanging and they come along.

We are convinced that non-violence is more powerful than violence … If you use violence, you have to sell part of yourself for that violence. Then you are no longer a master of your own struggle.
César E. Chávez, US farm workers' organiser, 1927-93

When you find "live wires" put them to work immediately. Find something they can do - any little thing - and get them started and ready to do more. Otherwise you'll lose them for the cause.
Fred Ross Sr, the organizer who trained Cesar Chavez

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash. Your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them.
William Faulkner, U.S. author

...the pure market is a fantasy; the examples of the two most traded commodities in the contemporary world, oil and drugs, show how political, social and cartel factors override and distort the workings of supply and demand.
Fred Halliday, 2008

And here's some lovely quotes on globalization for next time you're invited to a World Bank or IMF meeting to help formulate more equitable and just global economic policies. See if you can guess the author before you get to the end.

Underlying the problems of the IMF and the other international economic institutions is the problem of governance: who decides what they do. The institutions are dominated not just by the wealthiest industrial countries, but by commercial and financial interests in those countries, and the policies of the institutions naturally reflect this.

The discontent with globalization arises not just from economics seeming to be pushed over everything else, but because a particular view of economics - market fundamentalism - is pushed over all other views... This notion flies in rhe face both of economics, which emphasizes the importance of trade-offs, and of ordinary common sense.

It has become increasingly clear, not to just ordinary citizens but to policy makers as well... that globalization has not lived up to what its advocates promised... In many cases commercial interests and values have superceded concern for the environment, democracy, human rights, and social justice.

Noam Chomsky? Walden Bello? No, this isn't a case of: "well they would say that, woundn't they?". The speaker is actually Joseph Stiglitz - former chief economist at the World Bank, economic advisor to Bill Clinton, and Nobel Prize winner for economics. Further essays by Stiglitz are available from our online library.

Excerpt from Emma Rosenthal's poem...

This battle

this battle implores
we understand the complexion of wealth
the essense of water
the sanctity of land
the wall between neighbors

this battle requires
a fight with open hands
and broken heart
i am not afraid to show you my wounds
nor tend to yours
nor am i afraid of connection
or honest deliberation

this battle commands
diligent study
patient instruction
honors life through righteous living
requires that i do not avert my eyes
that i insist you look at mine

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