Letitia James Quotes
Some contractors force workers to provide paybacks to keep their jobs. Others intentionally misclassify workers in order to underpay them - by, for example, paying a skilled construction worker as a general laborer.
James, Letitia. "Statement on Legislation to Protect Construction Workers from Wage Theft." The Official Website of the City of New York, 2015.
This is not a common quotation from Thoreau. The great man for whom the establishment had so much respect had a very anti-capitalist streak. His view is that the employer will generally never pay his laborers a fair wage. Instead he will pay the laborer the lowest rate for which he can obtain the laborers services. If the laborer generates added value for his wage, the employer is in a zero sum game with the laborer. If part of the added value—the profit is paid to the laborer, the employer does not have it for himself (or his stockholders). In most cases, the laborer is forced to work for his and his family’s subsistence. This theory argues that they only way the laborer will get a fair wage is if there is a labor shortage (assuming no government laws or union pressure is in the picture. Many capitalists argue that a “fair” wage is what a free man is willing to work for and a free employer is willing to pay. So economics is like politics in general with respect to fairness—there is no universally accepted definition of what is fair.
At the time many workers lived in housing owned by their employer. When the Pullman company had a labor dispute, they not only locked the workers out of their jobs but evicted them from their meager housing.
At the end of the 19th century, there were no private pensions for industrial workers nor was their A Social Security system of any other provision for retirement as workers age. Nor was their any Medicare or welfare system then established. Gompers’ description was then accurate.
Labor leader Samuel Gompers used this statement to publically praise the passage of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.
He in that same year then persuaded sympathetic MP, John Hobhouse, to introduce the first bill into the House of Commons regulating child labor in the mills. Considered radical in its day, forbade employment of children under the age of 9 from working in the mills, and then limited the hours that children from 9 to 18 to 12 hours a day. The bill was rejected with the same claims that have been made regarding child labor reform attempts ever since. It would slow growth, harm the economy, exacerbate the poverty of poor families and interfere with the parents right to bring up their children. It was not until after his death in 1861 that meaningful child labor laws were passed for the British mills.
Letitia Ann "Tish" James is an American lawyer, activist, and politician. She is a member of the Democratic Party and the current attorney general of New York, having won the 2018 election to succeed appointed attorney general Barbara Underwood. She is the first African-American and the first woman to be elected to the position.
