Factory Worker Quotes & Sayings

The concrete, physical reality of inequality is visible to the naked eye and naturally inspires sharp but contradictory political judgments. Peasant and noble, worker and factory owner, waiter and banker: each has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each person's judgment of what is and is not just. Hence there will always be a fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension to inequality, which inevitably gives rise to political conflict that no purportedly scientific analysis can alleviate. — Thomas Piketty

Estiven Rodriguez couldn't speak a word of English when he moved to New York City at age nine. But last month, thanks to the support of great teachers and an innovative tutoring program, he led a march of his classmates - through a crowd of cheering parents and neighbors - from their high school to the post office, where they mailed off their college applications. And this son of a factory worker just found out he's going to college this fall. — Barack Obama

I want to make a film about a factory worker. — Richard Linklater

War is a farmer's son from Kansas trying to kill a factory worker's son from Berlin, with neither of them knowing why. — Randall Wallace

When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out. — Leslie T. Chang

On Internment, you can be anything you dream
a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker. You can spend entire afternoons watching clouds so close it's as though you're riding on them. Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There's only one rule: You don't approach the edge. If you do, it's already over. My brother is proof of that. He has successfully quieted my delusions I held about seeing the ground for myself. — Lauren DeStefano

One way was Taylorism. Frederick W. Taylor had been a steel company foreman who closely analyzed every job in the mill, and worked out a system of finely detailed division of labor, increased mechanization, and piecework wage systems, to increase production and profits. In 1911, he published a book on "scientific management" that became powerfully influential in the business world. Now management could control every detail of the worker's energy and time in the factory. As Harry Braverman said (Labor and Monopoly Capital), the purpose of Taylorism was to make workers interchangeable, able to do the simple tasks that the new division of labor required - like standard parts divested of individuality and humanity, bought and sold as commodities. — Howard Zinn

These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who'd never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold anything and didn't know how to sell anything, who'd never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker - people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. — Philip Roth

Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford — Charles Fishman

But doing 'Parenthood,' I've never ever been happier in 35 years. I drive to work and I drive home. I'm like a factory worker and that is in my DNA. I love having a steady job with the same people. It's made me so much calmer and more content. Now I just hope the series goes on for 15 years. — Dax Shepard

People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.' — Rodney Brooks

And I think it is the genius of actors to be able to escape whatever people are expecting of them. Otherwise you become like a factory worker. — Olivier Martinez

Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives in short, all the technical laws and customs which he encounters in office or factory. — Jacques Ellul

My grandfather was a really, really tough no-nonsense factory worker who emigrated from Ireland in about 1900 to Bridgeport, Conn. He had a big effect on me. Those guys who took a great leap out into what they knew not were the ones who were the real stars, the real heroes. — Brian Dennehy

When every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied ... His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other. — Max Stirner

You don't want to say somebody did a great job of acting. You want to say, "Where did he find that person? How did he get that factory worker to come out of the factory and be on camera?" You want to believe that person is real. — Ronee Blakley

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves ... — Slavoj Zizek

I love the fact we're still on the road. I was born to be a factory worker really, so for me the chance to get on stage at Wembley 30 years after we started is amazing. — Joe Elliott

There is nothing a worker resents more than to see some man taking his job. A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble. — Charles M. Schwab

My father was a factory worker, and we were really poor. But everything I earned peddling papers and working in stores, he made me put aside for education. — Abraham A. Ribicoff

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes - since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, — Sinclair Lewis

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience. — Ezra Miller

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay. — Harvey Fierstein

For the blue-collar worker, the driving force behind change was factory automation using programmable machine tools. For the office worker, it's office automation using computer technology: enterprise-resource-planning systems, groupware, intranets, extranets, expert systems, the Web, and e-commerce. — Tom Peters

Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company. The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant. — James Sinegal

I'm in show business. I'm not like a poor factory worker who'd been laid off. — Woody Allen

Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day
the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office
he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. — G.K. Chesterton

The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story. — Christine Jennings

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming. — Alain De Botton

He is sure to be more happy who has eaten well and slept well and has besides a little money in his jeans. Such men are rare to find for the simple reason that most men are incapable of appreciating the wisdom of such a simple truth. The worker thinks he would be better off if he were running the factory; the owner of the factory thinks the would be better off if he were a financier; and the financier knows he would be better off if he were clean out of the bloody mess and living the simple life. — Henry Miller

One day I heard a speech of Hitler. In this speech he said that the German factory worker and the German labourer must make common cause with the German intellectual worker. — Fritz Sauckel

The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory. — Karl Marx