Low Wage Quotes

#1. The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.

Nick Hanauer

#2. The secret's out: New York's Labor Law provides the power to help low-wage workers earn enough to meet their basic needs.

Eric Schneiderman

#3. The vast majority (over 80 percent) of fast-food and similar low wage service jobs (<$9.24/hr) are held by adults. A quarter are adults over 40. Another quarter are moms raising kids.

David Rolf

#4. Walmart isn't your average mom-and-pop operation. It's the largest employer in America. As such, it's the trendsetter for millions of other employers of low-wage workers.

Robert Reich

#5. A low wage business is always insecure.

Henry Ford

#6. Low-wage jobs have gone offshore. We need to innovate to stay competitive.

Jeanne Shaheen

#7. We [US] can't compete with low-wage countries in different parts of the world. We cannot compete with countries that play games with currencies or regulations. We can't. We shouldn't.

Tom Wolf

#8. Walmart is so huge that a wage boost at Walmart would ripple through the entire economy, putting more money in the pockets of low-wage workers. This would help boost the entire economy - including Walmart's own sales.

Robert Reich

#9. When Obama boasts that it will be a huge boon to the economy to give amnesty to millions of low-wage workers, who won't pay income taxes but will need a lot of government services, remember: Obamacare was supposed to save money, too.

Ann Coulter

#10. Every three weeks before an election the TV ads expressing great concern about our trade policy and the loss of jobs to China and other low-wage countries. And then it's forgotten about the day after the election.

Bernie Sanders

#11. Wal-Mart provides a chilling example of the damage that low-wage, nonunion corporations can wreak, and their business model is going to set the standards for our children unless we do something now. Wal-Mart is the sewer pipe through which good jobs are being flushed.

Andy Stern

#12. Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia.

Niall Ferguson

#13. Asia has an army of low-wage laborers to thank for its economic boom.

Paul Achleitner

#14. If I run a time-limited test program, I'll never discover whether markets with additional employment truly exist. A solution in the low-wage sector cannot be a limited special program.

Angela Merkel

#15. If cheap immigrant labor is made unavailable, employers can hire Americans at a higher wage, or replace low-wage immigrant workers with technology and automation, which will create a smaller number of skilled jobs for Americans.

Jan C. Ting

#16. There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy's entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.

Edmund Phelps

#17. The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes.

Spencer Bachus

#18. Not only must we fight to end disastrous unfettered free trade agreements with China, Mexico, and other low wage countries, we must fight to fundamentally rewrite our trade agreements so that American products, not jobs, are our number one export.

Bernie Sanders

#19. It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

Robert B. Reich

#20. By holding down natural wage growth in labor-intensive industries, immigration serves as a subsidy for low-wage, low-productivity ways of doing business, retarding technological progress and productivity growth.

Mark Krikorian

#21. I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.

Sam Walton

#22. Women with minimal access to resources and no access to child care have limited choices that too often mean low-wage and part-time labor. In rural communities in the developing world, when women farmers have unequal access to fertilizers or training, their farm productivity lags behind men.

Lael Brainard

#23. I think we do not need to send more jobs to low wage countries. I think corporate America has to start investing in this country and create decent paying jobs here.

Hillary Clinton

#24. Low-wage workers are also consumers. It's just common sense: when these workers have more take-home pay it leads to spending that trickles up to benefit many small, locally owned businesses.

Mark Price

#25. America isn't Congress. America isn't Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

Barack Obama

#26. An increase in the relative price of products from the low wage manufacturers in Asia and Latin America will also make those products less attractive to American consumers.

Martin Feldstein

#27. We must use every tool at our disposal to lift the living standards of low-wage employees.

Eric Schneiderman

#28. The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

Jim Clyburn

#29. Being an American doesn't mean that you're guaranteed a high wage. You have to be productive, and we have to create a very low-cost, efficient place to do business, and we've let all that slip in America.

Michael Porter

#30. 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.

Edmund Phelps

#31. Certainly other things we can do, we gotta promote after-school employment, give kids an opportunity, raising the minimum wage was part of that, we can't expect that young people are going to feel they can make a living out there for such low wages.

Matt Gonzalez

#32. 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.

Jon Corzine

#33. 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.

Joseph Stiglitz

#34. Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing - and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.

Thomas Sowell

#35. The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.

Thomas Sowell

#36. NAFTA recognizes the reality of today's economy - globalization and technology. Our future is not in competing at the low-level wage job; it is in creating high-wage, new technology jobs based on our skills and our productivity.

John F. Kerry

#37. The theoretically unrestricted right to develop power, to wage war against other states, is antisocial and is doubly dangerous, because the state as a mass entity represents a low moral and intellectual level.

Christian Lous Lange

#38. Roman, remember that you shall rule the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to make peace the custom, to spare the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.

Virgil