Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.
— A. Philip Randolph
Helpful Minimum Wage quotations
I heard Russell Simmons say that, 'people have million dollar dreams with a minimum wage work ethic.' Basically, everybody wanna be rich but don't nobody wanna work for it.
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country... By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of decent living.
The real minimum wage is zero.
A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.
In my view, we need a massive federal jobs program which puts millions of our people back to work. We must end our disastrous trade policies. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. And we have to fight for pay equity for women.
I was making almost minimum wage on 'The Young and the Restless.
' But it was my first job, so I accepted my first quote. I had a great time on it, and it obviously led me to better things.
So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.
I think the minimum wage will be the centerpiece of the State of Union.
I think it should be the centerpiece of the State of the Union. And it should be very focused on that because, as you said, Republicans in the rest of the country are for it.
You can't have a million dollar dream with a minimum wage work ethic.
Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs;
it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.
The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs.
This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.
Even a wizard would have a great deal of difficulty repealing the economic law that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Since politicians are not wizards, they should not try.
Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially so among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.
These vessels are out of sight, out of mind.
They are exempt from minimum-wage requirements, from Coast Guard inspections, OSHA regulations and other safety laws.
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.
I want to applaud those workers rallying to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. I believe strongly that a great nation will not survive when so few have so much and so many have so little. Every worker in America should be given respect, dignity and the wages and benefits they need to take care of their family.
The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.
Every single thing I`ve done, from the Affordable Care Act to pushing to raise the minimum wage, to making sure that young people are able to go to college and get good job training, to what we`re pushing now in terms of sick paid leave,everything I do has been focused on how do we make sure the middle class is getting a fair deal.
There are people who would like to get rid of minimum wage.
But we have to have it, because if we didn't some people would not get paid money. They would work all week for two loaves of bread and some Spam.
Stop saying athletes do it for the love of the game.
They do it for the love of their 32-room mansion with the live shark tank in the living room. If pro sports paid minimum wage, Shaquille O'Neal would be a bouncer at Scores, and Anna Kournikova would be a mail-order bride from Minsk.
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.
I think the right-wingers have to buddy up to the fact that either the minimum wage has to go up, and people get enough money to live, or you're always going to have people needing government assistance. You can't have it both ways.
The typical minimum wage earner is a provider and a breadwinner - most likely a woman - responsible for paying bills, running a household and raising children.
From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.
Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
The minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people.
No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage.
In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.
Unskilled and inexperienced workers are the ones most often deprived of employment opportunities by increases in the minimum wage.
Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job.
The bottom has fallen out of America's wage floor.
And the erosion of the minimum wage has lowered pay and working standards for all of us.
At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.