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We are implementing an in-depth reform on labor market, not to reduce rights for workers but to provide more visibility and more efficiency to investors and employers because it's the key for job creation.

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

New York is for everybody; it's for the poor, it's for the middle-class, it's for the wealthy. We can't punish any one group and chase them away.

Labor also wants shorter hours and a say in how work shall be done.

Every worker needs a decent and legal source of income.

Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

The bill that job creators and out-of-work Americans need us to pass is the one that ensures taxes won't go up - one that says Americans and small-business owners won't get hit with more bad news at the end of the year.

We have to get very militant with some of these employers to say there's no shortcuts, our people have a right to a fair day's wage for a fair day's pay, and we've got to get that done. And that's going to happen.

Laboring men can perform for themselves the office of becoming their own employers.