Low Wages Quotes

Pay your people the least possible and you'll get from them the same.

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

Allowing slavery will starve the poor white laborer.

When illegal labor is used, that almost always depresses wages paid to all workers. The illegal workers can be exploited, and they will usually accept lower wages. As a result, all workers in the plant, including U.S. citizens, will see their wages go down.

NAFTA, supported by the Secretary cost, us 800,000 jobs nationwide, tens of thousands of jobs in the Midwest. Permanent normal trade relations with China cost us millions of jobs. Look, I was on a picket line in early 1990's against NFATA because you didn't need a PhD in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour.

I will use all my influence in trying to remove from our factory system the cruelties which are practiced in our mills.

Wal-Mart has always paid low wages, or, as Sam Walton put it, 'as little as we could get by with at the time.'

These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.

The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time - 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn't have toilets in the fields; they didn't have cold drinking water. They didn't have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

General well-being is incompatible with lowness of wages.

What could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work?

It is in another world. In the midst of so much wealth there seems to nothing but chimneys and flaring furnaces with wretched cottages around them. Add to this a thick and black atmosphere and you have but a first impression of the life a third of my subjects are forced to live.

We need to do more to help the men and women across the country who are working hard but still struggling to make ends meet due to low wages and high healthcare costs.

Some people welcome the flexibility of a zero-hours contract. But their growth is symptomatic of a wider issue - increasing job insecurity and falling living standards in David Cameron's Britain.

If we believe in the free market, then that leads to the big corporations taking power, that leads to this competition to lower wages, and that leads to precarious work.

Morally bankrupt wage practices and laws cannot hold.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is an economic regimen of low wages and lax regulations…. The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won

Too many children are being parked in substandard day care with workers who make little more than a parking attendant.

Open borders drive wages down for the black community.

Here live women, the mothers of many children, who work at night. These women have never rested. They do not know what an unburdened hour is. Five nights a week for ten hours they work for a quarter an hour at midnight.

When you buy a meal and you pay a fair price for it, are you doing this to ensure that the employees get health care? When you walk into Mickey D's and you buy a Big Mac, do you ask them, "By the way, is this thing costing enough so that you get health care here? By the way, is this Big Mac costing enough so that you get a pension here?" Do you think any of that when you go buy a Big Mac? No. You want it to be as cheap as it can be. That's why you're there.

The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.