Hattie McDaniel Quotes

There is no question that we, as a country, need to deal with economic inequality across the country, and we need to make sure we have good-paying jobs for everyone.

I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it's not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.

Every thoughtful and kind-hearted person must regard with interest any device or plan which promises to enable at least the more intelligent, enterprising, and determined part of those who are not capitalists to cease to labor for hire.

President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.

The best social programs we've had in this country are those that have united the middle class and the poor.

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

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

Organizing gives workers the power to lift themselves out of poverty and build a better future.

The social justice movement of the 21st century is economic development.

Economic mobility will fix income inequality.

As I see it, if the production of a factory is expanding, and workers are satisfied, it's OK for there to be a disparity. The best paid should be about three times more than the worst paid.

Workers are not being exploited. But if their share of growth doesn't increase, this could be a potential cause of social tension worldwide.

So as a nation, we have a right to be very proud of the successes that we have seen because of the struggle of millions of people to create a less discriminatory society. That is something we should be proud of, but there is one struggle in which not only have we not succeeded but in which we are losing ground and that is the fundamental struggle for economic justice.

I'd rather play a maid than be one.

This is a guy [Steven Lerner] who believes, for example, that Reaganomics or trickle-down economics means, "The rich got rich by stealing from the poor," or stealing from the middle class and making them poor via debt. He has worked with unions in Europe.

The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it's taken on a new and urgent edge. Instead of shared prosperity our political system has now produced a winner-take-all economy.

Misguided liberal Joseph Stiglitz.Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize winner, claims the American dream is dead.

There's a lot of money in wars, except in the war on poverty. Can't make any bread helping the poor.

American Dream Is Under Assault. People that haven't been able to find a job in months and this growing sense in this country that this is the new normal, well we can't accept that.

As it has over the decades, the union movement stands for the fundamental moral values that make America strong: quality education for our children, affordable health care for every person-not just some-an end to poverty, secure pensions and wages that enable families to sustain the middle-class life that has fueled this nation's prosperity and strength. Union members and other working family activists don't just vote our moral values-we live them. We fight for them, day in, day out. Our commitment to economic and social justice propels us and everything we do.

Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth...

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.