A Quote by Michael Moore

Before there were unions, there was no middle class.

Michael Moore

Quote Topics

Before Class Middle Middle Class Unions Were

Quote Author

Michael Moore
American - Activist
Born: April 23, 1954

Unions sustained and fed the middle class. It's no coincidence that as union membership has continued to dwindle, so have the fortunes of the middle class.

John Fetterman

Labor unions have a long history of benefitting all workers, even those who are not members of unions, because everyone's wages go up. If we don't increase membership - and membership in labor unions is going down because of the attacks against organized labor - it's something every single American, whether they're officially in a union or not, should be concerned about. It's a spiral. It's a weakening of the middle class and our economy can't sustain that.

Nina Turner

I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.

George Packer

'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.

Elizabeth Warren

Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

Andy Stern

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

Sugar Ray Leonard

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Glenn Reynolds

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Judith Martin

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

Margo Jefferson

We are the ones looking out for the middle class. Who do think pays for the endless expansion of government? Its middle class taxpayers. Our reforms protect middle class taxpayers.

Scott Walker

And if we truly want a strong and secure middle class, we must restore the ability of labor unions to organize and represent working people.

Martin Luther King III

Wes Clark put forward a middle-class tax plan, but it only helps a quarter of middle-class families, none without minor children at home. And mine helps 98 percent of the middle class.

Joe Lieberman

I think 'The Wood' was probably more concerned with the parts of Inglewood that aren't usually seen on film - the areas that were middle-class, or upper-middle-class - and that idea that these worlds do exist, and should be accepted as part of Inglewood itself.

Rick Famuyiwa

Unions go hand-in-hand with a strong middle class.

Eric Schneiderman

My brother and late sister and I were raised in Detroit; it was where the middle class across racial lines, the middle class was able to develop, build a home, have for the first time retirement benefits, have a job, and yes, their kids began to go to college.