Images of Labor Educational Posters
for the social studies and literature classrooms, homeschoolers, & office decor.

Educational posters from the “IMAGES OF LABOR” series featuring quotes about the struggles of working people from an eclectic group of historic figures: Roberto Acuna, George Baer, Eugene V. Debs, Lucy Parsons, A. Philip Randolph, Nicola Sacco, Carl Sandburg, Sojourner Truth, Mark Twain and a Sit Down Striker.

Labor Day is a legal holiday observed in the United States, Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone, and the Virgin Islands. The holiday in honor of the working class was initiated in the U.S. in 1882 by the Knights of Labor, and the first Labor Day holiday was celebrated in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The second Labor Day holiday just a year later in 1883 and in 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the date. The Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow their example of a “workingmen’s holiday”. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.
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• “That society is wrong which looks on labor as being any more degrading to women than to men.” ~ Susan B. Anthony
• “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” ~ Aristotle
• “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.”~ Clara Barton
• “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” ~ Feodor Dostoyevsky
• “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I.W.W's who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.” ~ William O. Douglas
• “Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.” ~ Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)
• “Work is love made visible.” ~ Khilil Gibran
• “I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.” ~ Benjamin Harrison
• “Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.” Robert G. Ingersoll
• “Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosopher's stone, and the cap of good fortune.” ~ James Weldon Johnson
• “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” ~ Karl Marx
• “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.” ~ Karl Marx
• “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” ~ Thomas Merton
• “The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.” ~ Blaise Pascal
• “No laborer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love - except the housewife.” ~ Lettie Cottin Pogrebin
• “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” ~ Upton Sinclair
• “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.” ~ Adam Smith
• “A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.” ~ Adam Smith
• “Labour was the first price, the original purchase – money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.” ~ Adam Smith
• “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” ~ Arnold Toynbee
• “Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.” ~ Max Weber

* Most of the Images of Labor poster series are no longer available, I haven't located an another source for this poster set. The links will take you to alternative suggestions. - View the History of Labor posters for more images around the study of labor.