Employment Quotes

The problem is that the media rarely discusses the real reasons behind why women leave their jobs. We hear a lot about the desire to be closer to the children, the love of crafting and gardening, and making food from scratch. But reasons like lack of maternity leave, lack of affordable day care, lack of job training, and unhappiness with the 24/7 work culture-well, those aren't getting very much airtime.

~ Emily Matchar

The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.

~ Ivan Illich

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.

~ Ivan Illich

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

~ Ivan Illich

Providing employment is the best form of social service, as it serves you, others, your country, your world - the entire society.

~ Amit Kalantri

In another thirty to fifty years, the demand for cheap labor will have produced even more machines over the employment of actual humans. And in that time frame, humans will have lost their voice, their power, all freedoms, and all worth. It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

~ Suzy Kassem

I made the mistake of using my earned sick time at the W. M. Keck Observatory for essential surgery. When I returned to work the management team demanded my resignation numerous times, citing my essential surgery as a reason. The W. M. Keck Observatory taught me that using earned sick time in the USA may put your future employment at significant risk.

~ Steven Magee

I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again.

~ Gillian Flynn

Imagination is pure potentiality for creation. We shouldn't submit it to the hourly wages we subject our time at work.

~ Carlos Roche

If growing up means not seeing one’s family and friends on the regular—all in the name of paying the bills, then growing up is overrated.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.

~ Rex Curry

Not every single broke and unemployed person needs a job, some need customers.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A major reason many Americans still struggle to find meaningful work is because they are using tactics from the 1990s and early 2000s. The future for employment is now here...and it's online.~February 21, 2013 as featured by CBS Money Watch

~ Matt Keener

If you want your dreams to work out for you, you must work with them. Pay the price and have the package of your accomplishments in full versions.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Employment frees man from the nightmare of unemployment, while it chains him to his employer’s dream.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee’s dream on hold.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An 'Employee of the Month' is a titled given to someone who best helped someone else actualize their dream—in that particular month.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

*Employee* is a label given to a creature that could not hold on to its dream.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When we saw a destitute-looking man trying to sell worn flip-flops, I vowed never to complain about a job again. When I considered the steady paycheck and quality of life it provided, my past gripes - primarily boring meetings, back-biting office politics and pantyhose - were just whining.

~ Kristine K. Stevens

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

~ Ivan Illich

Poor people do not go on holiday, they go home.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.

~ Ivan Illich

For I have nothing to lean on, nowhere to call my home and there is nowhere I will go for Christmas to rest my head and touch familiar walls. I have no degree to show on paper or employment to take care of my health or the reassurance that I can pay my rent. And I have no right to complain because this is the road I choose and I built it myself, not really knowing where I wanted it to lead, but I have hope in all things ahead and behind and I am learning to let myself go. Forget my own ego and believe that what I am doing is grander than my very own self.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The definition of 'Employment' by an employer, and, that by an employee, are seldom the same.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

*I’m hustling* is a low self-esteem having man’s way of saying *I’m unemployed,* when answering a seemingly materialistic woman’s question as to what he does for a living.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Life ups the self-esteem of a low-paid man by giving him things that the high-paid man that he envies cannot buy (intellect, looks, sex appeal, etc.).

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Employment is the exploitation of the employer’s courage, and, the employed’s fear of failure.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

~ Paul A. Samuelson

Not every poor or unemployed person who has one wears a political party’s t-shirt to reveal their political affiliation, some use it merely to conceal their nipples.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An indoor man eats nothing, except that which is prepared and served by his mother with lots of insults, an outdoor man eats that which he buys, prepares, served and eaten with lots of respect.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

In a materialistic society, an employed boy is older than an unemployed man.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A man who will steal for me will steal from me. Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.

~ David Mccullough

To be enslaved then, you needed to be ignorant. To be enslaved today, you need to be knowledgeable.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Thanks to his salary, an employee is free to eat whatever, wherever. However, because of his job, he is not free to eat whenever.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

12% of employees eat because they are hungry. 88% of employees eat because it is 1 o’clock.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they’re not really concerned about him, they’re concerned about their daughter’s tummy.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

He didn’t care if I hated him, only that I did as I was told.

~ Sheri Webber