A. Philip Randolph Quotes

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

People can't live on $7.50 an hour.

No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage. In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

This is the middle-class equivalent of raising the minimum wage.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

The sad fact is that in communities such as mine, the minimum wage is the maximum wage.

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists … poverty is slavery!

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

What we're seeing is that even in high poverty neighborhoods, the average cost of renting is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients and low wage workers.

I see all kinds of people work hard all over the world, and some of them are barely making it. I don't just mean subsistence farmers. I mean people in the developed world who work multiple jobs, and because the cost of health care and child care eats up almost all of the living they make.

Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market.

Workers and students and part-time working parents across New Mexico are taking home too little, trying to stretch dollars as far as they'll go to pay for basic necessities.

Even if we raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it's still hard to prosper on that wage.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation wages.

New York City has become a place where it's not easy for the working class to even live.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

Political rights notwithstanding, 'freedom' rings awfully hollow when you're getting nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life.

All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they're in the same boat. They've got no economic opportunities.

If a mother or a caregiver does not have a job that pays a living wage and they cannot afford child care, that is unacceptable. I've talked to my constituents over the years, and child care can almost bankrupt a family, even a two-parent household in which both parents are working.

There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.

For many gay and bisexual men of color, economic inequalities add to the pernicious effects of oppression and homophobia.