Workers Quotes

“You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats...”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“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

“Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.

The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.”
― Noam Chomsky

“All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. “There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here,” that’s what they always say. “Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around.” “As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers.” Both favor alcohol and are against pot.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“He was thinking that the cities, perhaps, needed to look into the future even more than the country did. They should look ahead for forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty years, to a strong and healthy plain of population - or to an overworked, weakened, underfed, and infertile desert.”
― Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder

“Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the very real social barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment, argues Frayne, can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities constraining us. In a world where problems like disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“Watch out for when you're not working, you're not talking about work.”
― Brother Pedro

“Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“AI doesn't take any breaks. Plus, AI won't file sexual harassment charges when your boss flirts with it.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“Good bosses shield their employees from distress and distraction in diverse ways, whether behind the scenes or publicly. They work day after day to enhance their self-awareness; stay in tune with followers’ worries, hot buttons, and quirks; and foster a climate of comfort and safety. They also learn to identify which battles their people consider crucial to fight, and which they see as unimportant. When bosses can’t protect people—for example, from layoffs, pay cuts, or tough assignments—the best ones convey compassion, do small things to allay fears, and find ways to blunt negative consequences. Operating in this way helps bolster your people’s performance and well-being. And a nice by-product is that they will have your back, too.”
― Robert I. Sutton

“Brenda was having none of it. She sat there like one of the working-class ladies of his childhood, bitter fighters with bright red faces, emanating a savage scary blankness that he understood to mean: Fuck you, you are not forgiven.”
― George Saunders, Liberation Day

“The corruption has been allowed to go on for too long and the masses will always associate the name ‘Police’ with corrupt public workers.”
― Steven Magee

“I have had so many negative interactions with electrical utility workers that I now avoid interacting with them!”
― Steven Magee

“I see a lot of commonality between the health issues high altitude workers develop and Long COVID symptoms.”
― Steven Magee

“...people can be divided into two groups: those who have worked in a bar, or cafe, or restaurant, or shop, and those who have not. And while it would be both unfair and untrue to say that everyone in the latter category treats those in the former as a second-class citizen, it is probably accurate to say that virtually nobody from the first category will do so.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“I wouldn't work in a hospital again! They do not tell you about the high disease risks when they hire you. It is well known that hospital jobs are lemons today with the pandemic. One of my coworkers was suffering with chronic fatigue from her thirties onward. She has never been healthy since working there. She probably had an infection from a sickly patient and never recovered.”
― Steven Magee

“Stop counting the forgotten people in this world, they are too many! Count the unforgotten, you will quickly find out the number of the forgotten!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“...Працювали на фабриках, що вже майже нічого не випускали, крім важких індустріальних стогонів.”
― Артем Чех, Хто ти такий?

“The workers in professional astronomy were not informed about the extensive biological research that had been performed on high and very high altitude biological exposures.”
― Steven Magee

“There is an effort underway in the USA by the rich to have workers working really long hours for not a lot of money or benefits.”
― Steven Magee

“The cloak of the worker is heavy:
It's a hero's cape for all that you do.”
― Lowrey E. Gray, 42

“There is no greater compliment than to be congratulated by one's peers.”
― George S. Midla "From Love to War"

“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

“...executives are often insulated from the scale and variety of problems faced by junior employees. Even when senior leaders try to seek out information, most employees put on a brave face because they’re afraid to show weakness or vulnerability. Top leaders are further handicapped by their own psychology: Research shows that power reduces empathy, which means they identify less with both the frontline employees’ challenges and the middle managers who must deal with these issues daily.”
― Heidi K. Gardner

“... symbolic capitalists are professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists.”
― Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

“Team work is far better than ordinary workers”
― Onipede Ayomide

“Since I'm no longer a senior employee, but an old employee, everyone else has lost interest in me, and this has been an extremely liberating experience. In my mind, I live at the top of the hill. I seem almost to drift through the ship in a state of light-headedness.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“There's also an advisory board that's very into"--I made air quotes--"'optimal productivity.' Some theory about how productivity increases when workers don't know what their work is going to be each day. Switching from one task to another helps employees adapt and become more nimble? Something like that."

"Well, that's completely psychotic," Sailor said, but in an unsurprised way. "Wonder how many members of this illustrious advisory board own sweatshop empires, am I right?”
― Emma Sloley, The Island of Last Things