Deborah Chollet Quotes

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

It's wrong that so many hardworking people - people working full-time, or even multiple jobs - need public assistance just to survive.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

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

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.

It is unacceptable that someone can work full time - and work hard - and not be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

Jobs are being outsourced at such an alarming rate My neighbor has no job at all with no prospects to date. So perhaps I should be thankful for the little that I make If I dare to ask for a living wage My job would be at stake.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.

Millions of middle-class Americans, in free fall during the economic collapse that began around 2008, have had a taste of what it means to be poor.

People working full time should not have to raise their children in poverty.

Nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

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.

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.

We need to truly understand what economic injustice and inequality looks like for hard-working Canadians grappling with it every day on the ground, at home and at work.

I was one of the poorest people in America.