Tom Perez Quotes

One of the most pervasive and damaging trends we are seeing in the 21st-century workplace is the deliberate misclassification of workers by employers looking to shift responsibility and cut costs.

Disproportionate corporate power over governments is giving license to the greed that denies workers even minimum living wages. It is also seemingly a license to allow the sheer brutality of treatment of working people at the base of the supply chains.

Wage theft, worker rights and workplace discrimination should not be swept under the rug. The United States cannot have a functional economy where all the gains go to the corporate class while all the pain goes to regular workers.

The Singaporean government, which represents legal migrant workers in employment disputes and claims of exploitation, requires that they stay in the country until the disputes are settled. If they leave, their claims are closed.

Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.

Time after time we're told corporations should have freedom from pesky job safety regulations, environmental protections and labor standards - giving working people the freedom to be crushed in collapsing mines, choke on filthy air and get paid too little to live on.

Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant.

Those who claim that they need cash because they are unable to pay labourers are those who are not paying minimum wages.

We must defend the rights of working people to bargain collectively for fair wages and safe working conditions.

The workers who get hurt by corner-cutting often do not realize they are being wronged. Even when they do, they do not have the support and resources to fight back. Without a union to stand behind them, these workers are forced to stay in bad jobs, or face no job at all.

We too often hear about red tape but what they mean is the vital rights of workers.

I thought I was making fifty dollars a week [at MGM], but it turned out to be $35 because twelve weeks of the year you were on layoff. It was white slavery, and it lasted for seventeen years.

Employers ganging up against workers is like raising an army of elephants against ants.

In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee's lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price.

Final-offer arbitration should have great appeal for the daring (the risk seekers) who play against the timid (the risk avoiders).

In case of dispute, the umpire shall throw it straight into the field.

I'm going to take a series of actions on day one to protect American workers.

To constitute a dispute there must be two parties. To understand it well, both parties and all the circumstances must be fully heard; and to accommodate the differences, temper and mutual forbearance are requisite.

We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage.

I will not resolve a land dispute if civil groups or politicians are involved in the land disputes.

Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.

The bottom has fallen out of America's wage floor. And the erosion of the minimum wage has lowered pay and working standards for all of us.

International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smoldering one

Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.

When you have mega-corporations that have record profits, but they don't want to share even a little bit of that with their workers, we are actually putting our communities at peril.