(AP) - Comments from the front lines of the American organized labor movement:
'I began thinking, 'All of these jobs are gone, and nothing has replaced them. Who's to say my job is not next?' ... I would not want to work at a factory without a union. I look at some of the things that I've got now that most of your guys 29 years old don't have. And it was because of Delphi and the UAW that I was able to buy those things.' -- Jason Deaton, 29, who took a buyout from his $26-an-hour Delphi Corp. job in Dayton, Ohio.
'The labor movement has been a great institution. It has created what Americans are most proud of, and that's the greatest middle class in the world ... You have to adapt and find ways to be successful. We've been very slow to do that.' -- Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.
'If you go back to the '80s and even the '90s, it was nose-to-nose screaming, yelling to get things done. The mind-set of that has changed. The bottom-level supervisors and the people we deal with every day on the floor, they're just like us -- they're losing their jobs.' -- Chad Dzerve, president of UAW Local 662 in Anderson, Ind.
'I'm ecstatic. I'm going back to work ... It's been tough. We've had to cut corners, and the hardest thing was to tell your kids 'no' when they wanted something we couldn't afford.' -- Doug Long, 42, in Middletown, Ohio, after he and other Machinists union members voted in March to accept an AK Steel Holding Corp. contract offer to end the nation's longest work stoppage after more than a year.
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