Wage Inequality Quotes

The market tends to pay as a wage what an individual laborer is worth. But the case last studied suggests the question how accurately the law operates in practice. May it not be an honest law, but be so vitiated in its working as to give a dishonest result?

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

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

The real minimum wage is zero.

I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books—in its effect, not its intent.

Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth. Financiers are behind the unions and their object is to kill competition so as to reduce the income of the workers and eventually bring on war. We will never recognize the United Auto Workers Union.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

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.

The law of work does seem utterly unfair-but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, too.

Walmart's period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country.

If the price of a burger goes up 5 cents, and the minimum wage that you have received is going up from $7.25 to $15 an hour - and there have been a number of studies that document just how much the price of a burger might go up if you increase the minimum wage. You match the costs, and the benefits far outweigh the costs.

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.

To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.

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

Mexican men and women are doing the jobs that not even the Blacks want to do there in the United States..

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.

What we're concerned about is massive immigration of unskilled workers, mostly from the Maghreb and Africa, which pulls down salaries in France.

Without a union, the people are always cheated, and they are so innocent.

I think there's a big difference between the impact of trade agreements on corporate America and the impact on Mr. and Mrs. America. Corporate America has adjusted to them by investing lots of capital offshore... What we're doing is we're exporting jobs and importing products instead of exporting products and keeping jobs.

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

My problem with unions is they breed mediocrity.

I said these trade deals are going to be terrible: we're going to lose manufacturing jobs, factories abroad; the real wages of Americans are not going to rise. People are coming across the border; it has got to be stopped.

From its onset, the labor movement has been at the forefront of the fight to improve working conditions and workplace safety. At the local level, knowing their union has their back gives workers the confidence and support they need to stand up and report harassment, poor working conditions, or workplace safety violations.

I ask to be judged on the issue of unemployment.