Stephen J. Dubner Quotes

The state of Washington calls tips 'wages.'

The owners have the right to pay you whatever they want to. They don't have to pay you if they don't want to.

The people who come to work deserve to be paid properly, and there's no excuse. I could understand someone making a small error, but sometimes people make systematic errors, and that's not right.

In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn't pay my employees well.

Servers make very little in regular wages and largely rely on tips to pay the bills and budget for weeks ahead.

I wish we had a system where you are given a bill including service and that people were paid properly so they didn't have to rely on tips. In different restaurants there are different policies and it's all very confusing.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

You should pay the laborer his wages before his sweat dries

Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.

Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity.

If you're making $10 an hour and you're doing your job and you're doing it well and your check is consistently $8.75 an hour, who wouldn't stand up for themselves?

Our company wouldn't exist and wouldn't be around without our warehouse employees and our call center employees. And these employees - not just at Rent the Runway but at tens of thousands of other companies throughout the country - are treated unequally.

I am quite uncomfortable using legislation to peg the minimum wage.

I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.

All I ask is that you tip your waiters and waitresses. We have to turn this situation around.

The 'Living-Wage Campaign' at Harvard is like a Boston winter: you know it's going to strike, but wonder only when and how hard.

Obviously, we want people to be paid a wage that could help make ends meet, but when you increase artificially the cost of labor to do a job, then oftentimes, those jobs will just go away.

Regardless of what the minimum wage is, you really have the market wage. And if we're not taking care of our people, then we're going to lose good talent, at every level.

It was a Conservative government that in 2016 introduced the national living wage, giving Britain's lowest-paid workers the biggest pay rise in 20 years.

The problem with one single minimum wage is that you don't allow for younger people, who are less skilled and maybe more easily pushed out of the job market, or that the minimum wage should vary for different regions.

By tying minimum wage to money supply, the poor's income would rise and fall with the rise and fall in money supply.

Before the government decides to raise the minimum wage, it must consider the effects of the tax and benefits merry-go-round that affects the low-paid.

Barack Obama and Kay Hagan think that the minimum wage needs to be the same in the mountains of North Carolina and in the city of Boston - it makes no sense to me.

No one seriously believes that cutting the minimum wage is good for workers.

Cutting tax credits for education and training will result in more Americans working at minimum-wage jobs while U.S. companies go begging for the higher-paid skilled workers they need.