Frances O'Grady Quotes
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Ordinary people who have lots of good ideas want more than a suggestion box, and they need a union to represent that thinking.
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I do know what it's like to worry about bills, I do know what it's like to worry about even finding a child-minder, never mind paying them.
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I want a society that provides decent jobs for those who can work and decent security for those can't.
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There is nothing that says unions have a God-given right to be there. We have to work at it and make ourselves relevant to every section of the workforce.
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The image of the unions is still not in tune with where we actually are, which is fifty-fifty men and women, with an increasing number of women at the top. I think it is changing, but I'm not complacent about this.
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The dominant economic approach of the last thirty years is now on its last legs. Letting the market rip and an indifference to inequality are now seen as important causes of the greatest economic crash since the 1930s.
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A business is good if it gives a decent day's reward for a decent day's work, treats people decently, and gives them a voice at the top.
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Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.
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My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.
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In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.
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I worry that some politicians still think we are living in the 1950s where the man is the main breadwinner and the woman works for pin money. Actually, most families where there are two parents depend on two incomes to get by.
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Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.
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When I look at my daughter, who's 24, she is much more confident than I ever was and her expectations are higher. But I worry that there is a backlash brewing against progress on equality.
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It is not natural or inevitable that half the world goes hungry; that the freedom of markets trumps protection of the planet; or that citizens' rights come second to those of corporations.