Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.

Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.

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

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.

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

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.

“A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,” is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing; yet in what corner of this planet was that ever realized?

The battle to right the wrongs of income inequality is not – and cannot be – just a union issue. It is an issue for every American, union or non-union, white or of color, young or senior, straight or gay, income inequality is a battle for the very heart and soul of the nation.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

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

Sometimes it seemed to me I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north, to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor fight is at least fought by grown men.

The stones in your driveway may have come from the slaves who spend all day breaking rocks because it's cheaper for the company to get them from India, where the labor is free. We are all connected. And we all have human value. That's what my work is about.

The poor are the only consistent altruists; they sell all they have and give it to the rich.

Economic growth will not stop slavery, at least not anytime soon.

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.

I do not know the needs of a god or of another world.... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one.

An industry that can not pay its workers a decent living wage has no right to exist.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.