Martin Schulz Quotes

The rise of franchising, contracting, and other similar employment practices has made it harder to enforce worker protections like minimum wages, overtime pay, and the right to unionize.

We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time.

Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers.

They only ask for a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work.

A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work is ever my partner’s motto.

We say, pay talent well and genius generously, but pay well also the arm that toils; pay the needle, the saw, the spade, the hoe, the mop.

We can afford to pay workers fairly, and it is the right thing to do. We also need equal pay for equal work.

The higher the unemployment rate, the more leverage I have to 'encourage' you to 'do what it takes' to keep your job. And so you work even more hours, pushing unemployment up and wages down. And that, my friends, is one of the little tricks that keeps you poor and me rich.

Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing.

Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net.

In prosperous times, the marginal workers get by. But in tough times, they get the shaft.

The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.

People are still willing to do an honest day's work. The trouble is they want a week's pay for it.

I reject the idea that any job is too hard or too dirty for American workers to do. American workers just expect and demand to be paid a decent wage.

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist … The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

The priority of work over capital places an obligation in justice upon employers to consider the welfare of the workers before the increase of profits.

There can be no distress, there can be no hard times, when labor is well paid. The man who raises his hand against the progress of the workingman raises his hand against prosperity.

If women are given equal pay for Civil Service jobs, maybe other employers will do the same.

American capitalism today offers us no assurances that our efforts will be rewarded by security, stability or enough income to let us live well or at least well enough… Contemporary capitalism turns all workers—laborers and managers alike—into economic junk. The days if a long career with one employer, once a key part of the American dream, are long gone for most workers.

… employers use newcomers [illegal immigrants] to drive down wages because they are … in the shadows.

The labor movement was ill-equipped to deal with the new inequalities arising almost inevitably from the less secure, part time and low paid nature of women’s occupations.

The secret's out: New York's Labor Law provides the power to help low-wage workers earn enough to meet their basic needs.

In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.

Right here in New York, people are struggling in working conditions not much safer or fairer than the sweatshops of 1911.