Living Wage Quotes - Page 2

• For the workers and their families, being able to bring home a living wage helps their families and, by extension, helps our economy. Seventy percent of our economy is consumer-based. We know that when lower- and middle-class families have money and disposable income, they spend it. That puts money back into the economy. It's a win-win for everybody: Not just for the individual, not just production at a specific company (like Nissan), but for the greater good.

  Nina Turner

  Home, Winning, Class

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Positive, Zero, Health

  "P.J. O'Rourke Takes On 'The Wealth of Nations'". Interview with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. January 8, 2007.

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• I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  People, Grandparent, Southern

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• Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.

  Bernard Crick

  Factory Workers, Factories, Working For A Living

  Bernard Crick (1993). “In Defense of Politics”, p.240, University of Chicago Press

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• I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.

  John Lennon

  Feel Better, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Most employers I speak to, they want to create jobs and give decent salaries. Some small and medium companies say to me they cannot afford to pay the living wage. I say "what about if I gave you a business rate cut?" and they say, yes, ok. We want companies which are skilled up, generating more profit, more corporation tax - we should not be embarrassed at success, as long as they pay their taxes.

  Sadiq Khan

  Jobs, Cutting, Giving

  Source: www.alastaircampbell.org

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• If a mother or a caregiver does not have a job that pays a living wage and they cannot afford child care, that is unacceptable.

  Nina Turner

  Mother, Jobs, Children

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• If people envisage me in the Senate they might think of me as someone who would emulate Paul Wellstone, fighting for the issues he fought for. He was a good friend of mine. We'll be trying to do a couple of things. One is fighting for national health care. Another is fighting to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, and changing our trade policies.

  Bernie Sanders

  Couple, Fighting, Good Friend

  Interview with Ruth Conniff, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. December 1, 2005.

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• If Apple is enslaving Chinese to make its iPhones, you don't need to eat the i-Phone, you need to make sure that Apple is paying a living wage to someone, and then it adds a dollar to the cost of iphones, and everybody's cool.

  Bill McKibben

  Apples, Iphone, Phones

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• I am always an optimist. The pessimists are the liars who refuse to admit what is happening. And I'll give you three things we could do this instant to help Mexico: legalize drugs, renegotiate NAFTA so that it pays a living wage, protects unions and protects the environment and stop Plan Merida which gives $500 million a year to the Mexican army, the largest single criminal organization in Mexico.

  Charles Bowden

  Liars, Army, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Everyone can have health care. Everyone can earn a living wage. We can educate all our kids - well. But none of that happens unless there's a political revolution. And it's not going to happen unless we deal with corporate control of the media.

  Bernie Sanders

  Kids, Political Revolution, Media

  Interview with Ruth Conniff, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. December 1, 2005.

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• If you want to be backed by corporations so that you're elected mayor, then it's going to be very problematic for you to support a living wage campaign that would shift the minimum wage to something else.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Support, Campaigns, Minimum Wage

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Business of blurring is fantastic. They both are playing the politics of avoidance. They avoid all the issues on corporate power, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, so on and so forth. They avoid all those. That's the politics of avoidance. All the major issues that are so much on people's minds - health care, living wage, public works, jobs - they avoid.

  Ralph Nader

  Jobs, Israel, Iraq

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 24, 2008.

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• I do feel like food should cost more, because we aren't paying farmers a living wage. It has to cost more.

  Alice Waters

  Cost, Should, Farmers

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The size of the U.S. middle class has been shrinking. Wages have been stagnant. We don't have those factory jobs that paid a living wage and enabled a family to have a home where the wife did not have to work. But we sent our factories abroad and there is no likelihood of getting them back. Equally worrisome is that some managerial jobs and professional jobs (such as lawyers) which support middle class life are threatened by automation.

  Philip Kotler

  Jobs, Home, Class

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions. They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a 'living wage' all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements.

  Ann Coulter

  Jobs, Children, Crazy

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• Few places in American culture have made as effective a case for entrepreneurship than hip-hop. Hip-hop tells young people that our society is offering very limited options for youth. And that while society points to a radical decline in living wage jobs for youth and meaningful and affordable education, hip-hop is offering an alternative legitimate economy that is giving youth hope.

  Bakari Kitwana

  Meaningful, Jobs, Offering

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• And what would help minority workers are the same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth.

  Barack Obama

  Jobs, Opportunity, Law

  Barack Obama (2006). “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”, p.171, Crown

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• When I talk about the city, I talk about a city that elevates people, which is the strength of New York. We always had the ability to do that. We had the services to do that: good schools, living-wage jobs. We're moving away from that toward a two-tiered system: a small group of very wealthy people and the rest of the city, poor and working poor.

  Sal Albanese

  Jobs, New York, Moving

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• If you paid Americans a living wage, they would be able to pay for products made by Americans in America.

  Henry Rollins

  America, Would Be, Pay

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• With living wage jobs, basically 20 million of them to help jump-start a sustainable and healthy economy, with an insured, just transition, for example, for workers in both the fossil fuel and in the weapons industry, because they all need to transition to sustainable forms of production. This is also our answer to the departure of manufacturing jobs and good jobs by creating the manufacturing base here for clean renewable energy and the efficiency systems and public transportation to put these workers to work in jobs that are actually good for them.

  Jill Stein

  Jobs, Creating, Healthy

  Source: www.justicenewsnetwork.com

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• It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest. England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America. The wages of labour, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England.

  Adam Smith

  Country, Greatness, America

  Adam Smith, Laurence Dickey (1993). “Wealth of Nations (Abridged)”, p.35, Hackett Publishing

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• The loony tuners are at it again. The cost of doing business in Oakland is already about the highest in the state. Compared with other cities, adoption of the proposed

  Randy Hamilton

  Oakland, Cities, Adoption

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• If the proposed ordinance is adopted it will hurt small women- and minority-owned businesses the most, the majority of which are already struggling mightily to do business in this city of higher-than average costs of doing business.

  Randy Hamilton

  Hurt, Struggle, Average

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• By mandating an even higher minimum, the living wage prices even more people out of work. The people who push these cockamamie ideas never seem to ask why any employer would hire someone at $8.23 if that person's services are only valued in the marketplace at, say, $5.00.

  Lawrence Reed

  Ideas, People, Employers

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