Lynn Coady Quotes

For the longest time I was afraid I'd have to keep on working at the factories. There was a steel mill and a pottery; if you didn't go to college, you went to work in those places.

My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.

People ask me, 'Why don't you take time off?' but the working class doesn't take time off. They're out there working every day. That's what I do, too. I want them to know there is hope, and I'm out there just like they are.

You destroy the initiative of the working people if they don't feel they have a fighting chance to be a part of the American Dream.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

If we want to deliver opportunity for all, we need an economy that delivers jobs for the future.

Working 40 hours a week used to mean a minimum standard of living and a foothold on the first rung of the economic ladder to the middle class.

People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.'

Growing up, I knew you were supposed to have a profession - and something better than being a shopkeeper, which is what my parents were.

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

Tax credits do not help people get better jobs; in fact, they can create poverty traps that actually disincentivise people from working more hours or finding a better paid job.

For me, the labor movement and public education are linked as the essential building blocks to a strong middle class and a path to the American dream. It's why I went to Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations as an undergrad and then to law school.

It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.

I grew up in a family where my parents worked full-time and still found themselves and their six children trapped like so many of the working poor.

You've gotta realize this - you could be working at Burger King or working for the biggest wrestling company in the world.

What is the deepest passion for me and for us is the historic investment in the middle class and in - as I say often because I was that guy growing up - the dreams of those who look up who want to get into the middle class. That I feel the strongest about.

I just think the time and where I was brought up had a great deal to do in giving me the ambition to kind of get out and do something and not go into the steel mill.

I think we labor economists like to think of ourselves as being closer to the people.

Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organized education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment.

People have to recognise I'm a working-class lad. Forget what I've done and where I've been. I'm a working-class lad. I've come from nothing and I've not forgotten that.

Once upon a time, it was the Democrats who claimed to be the party of the working man. No longer. They abandoned the working guy. They slammed the door in their face, and now, it's President Trump and the new Republican Party that is supporting working Americans, blue-collar workers.

I believe Colorado needs representation from a conservative who has worked his way through the types of obstacles with which nearly all middle-class and lower-income people struggle.

As a player, you're not really in control of your destiny and the way you make a living.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.