Low Wage Work Quotes

When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

I was a cleaner while at university. The job wasn't bad, but I was amazed by how badly cleaners are treated - how disrespected they are by the people they work for.

I did an internship at the Ardent theatre company in Philly after dropping out of college. I was earning $165 a week building sets and cleaning the toilets. Cleaning toilets is a good way of getting in touch with your creativity. That's when you find out if you got anything going on in your head.

Juarez had become a failed city. The mayor of Juarez lived in El Paso. Not only did he not live in his own city, he didn't live in his own country. You had all these kids out of school who didn't want to work because they saw their mothers toiling in jobs for hardly any cash.

I've always had jobs with hierarchies - wherever I worked, like McDonald's, or cleaning toilets. It's always been hard.

A certain person wondered why a big strong girl like me wouldn't keep a job which paid a normal salary. I took my time to lead her and to read her every page. Even minimal people can't survive on minimal wage. A certain person wondered why I wait all week for you. I didn't have the words to describe just what you do. I said you had the motion of the ocean in your walk, and when you solve my riddles you don't even have to talk.

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

The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.

In high school, I started saving up to get a nose job, which is so ridiculous. I had this job at Tim Hortons, and I was trying to save up $10,000 for a nose job.

I don't see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute.

Anyone that I know who wants to work in these fields by the sweat of their brow, the bend of their back, picking lettuce and fruit, can do it. We don't want those jobs. Let's be real about that.

Ask any worker at Starbucks, Cosi, McDonald's or Walmart, 'How many jobs do you have?' and likely he or she will tell you: 'Two.' I know colleagues who've had breakfast at one store, and gone to lunch in another, only to find the same person waiting on them.

To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.

When I first immigrated to the United States, there were not many jobs that stood out. So I worked at a gas station, cleaning.

There are too few, low skill jobs for the number of low skill people.

I cleaned toilets and shined shoes.

I've been homeless. I've worked at 7-Eleven.

I shined shoes; I did windows.

Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her; she worked as an assistant to a maid.

I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

People in the precariat find themselves in the situation where the level of their education and qualifications is almost always higher than the sort of labour that they're going to be able to obtain.

Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.

I got depressed so many times by my blue-collar life and self-conscious about the fact that I didn't go to college. I was always working super low-end jobs, being the complete opposite of what I wanted to be.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

I thought in this country, the best social program was a job. Yet minimum wage jobs aren't paying enough to keep families out of poverty.