Paul Keating Quotes

The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.

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.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.

Market-led globalization is leading to a race to the bottom, where efficiency and profit matter more than a fair share for working people.

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.

Would you rather have cheap, subsidized - illegally subsidized - goods dumped into the Wal-Mart and not have a job and not have your wages go up in 15 years, or would you like to pay a little bit more - not much - a little bit more, have a job, and have your wages going up? I think the American people are going to make that choice.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

If we care about the average working American, then Wal-Mart matters. A lot.

I'll tell you where the injustice is. It's with the person earning £12,000 to £15,000-a-year who is being asked to be restrained by their business or employer. Yet the taxpayer has bailed out the banks, so why are they not showing restraint?

This administration and the leadership in Congress appear to be intent on valuing wealth over work, thereby placing working families at a distinct disadvantage.

I've had several working-man songs that I like.

Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people.

The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.

Our supporters can send the message that it's wrong for politically connected corporations to make millions while people doing an honest day's work are being cheated out of an honest day's pay.

The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

Giving them [workers] their own houses chain them once again to the soil and you break their power of resistance to the wage cutting of the factory owners.

A conservative is someone who demands a square deal for the rich.

I am always astonished that conservatives want to save money by paying workers less—driving down the wages of working people.

Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.

It's astounding to me that in a country where there is an ever-growing divide between rich and poor, that people won't accept the need for regulation on banks and salaries and so on.