Quotes & Sayings About Minimum Wage

Over the last 10 years a huge amount has been achieved in getting people into work. Measures such as the New Deal, tax credits, the minimum wage and improved childcare have brought about record numbers of people in work, a number that is still rising despite the global economic slowdown. — Lucy Powell

The American people want to raise the minimum wage. Every poll tells us that. That bill will not get to the floor of the Senate. The American people want to ask the rich to pay more in taxes. But the legislation that will get to the floor is tax breaks for billionaires. — Bernie Sanders

Men aren't allowed to have self-esteem, because we're already supposed to have all the power ... But most men earn less than they want, barely the minimum wage. They're drones. They do stuff they don't want to do to support their families, and they're not sure why they do it. They don't know what they're doing half the time, and any time we stick up for ourselves, we're pigs because we don't know how to articulate our frustrations and joys. — Tim Allen

The minimum wage was enacted in 1937 during the Great Depression and it has been increased 16 times. It's a well-established economic policy to help families. — John Freeman

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will benefit about 28 million workers across the country. And it will help businesses, too - raising the wage will put more money in people's pockets, which they will pump back into the economy by spending it on goods and services in their communities. — Thomas Perez

If I were in charge of the government, I would index the minimum wage to inflation, so that way, everybody knows what they can count on. — Fred DeLuca

Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system. — Elizabeth Warren

When I recently spent a night at a homeless shelter, I was dismayed that members of the middle class had moved in and that earning above the minimum wage did not protect adults from having to share a room with dozens of others. — Jackie Speier

[A]s we celebrate 75 years of the minimum wage, we must also recognize that it is no longer achieving its potential impact in our economy or for America's working families. Every American deserves the chance to build a better life for his or her family - and raising the minimum wage will provide that opportunity. — Tom Harkin

We have to raise the minimum wage. — Martin O'Malley

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. — Bill Maher

Any way you slice it, increasing the minimum wage in Michigan ... is likely to make it more difficult for the working poor to find jobs ... those who most need the work will have a harder time finding it. — Paul Kersey

[W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings. — Paul Krugman

Those externalized costs have always included labor. It is only the decline over time of the minimum wage in real dollars that's made the fast food industry possible, along with feedlot agriculture, pharmaceuticals on the farm, pesticides and regulatory forbearance. All these things are part of the answer to the question: Why is that crap so cheap? Our food is dishonestly priced. One of the ways in which it's dishonestly priced is the fact that people are not paid a living wage to process it, to serve it, to grow it, to slaughter it. — Michael Pollan

Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done. — Barack Obama

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

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. — Lenny Bruce

Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is "one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books" because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers. — David Horowitz

House Republican leadership have refused to allow a clean minimum wage vote. Close to 15 million Americans will be affected if we did this. Do Republicans really expect a family to live on less than $11,000 a year? — Bill Pascrell

[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today's social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills. — Doug Bandow

All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Barack Obama

We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage. — Martin Luther King Jr.

There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people. — Elizabeth Warren

I eat excellent bread, clean meat, good crisp veggies, organic fruits and nice wine and cheese. It is one of the things I am truly grateful for. I'm not kidding. You can't ask a single mother of three working two jobs for minimum wage to eat that way. I am lucky. — Rachael Taylor

You can't have a million dollar dream with a minimum wage work ethic. — Zig Ziglar

Today a minimum wage earner has to work a day and a half just to pay for a full tank of gas. That is simply shameful. — Bill Pascrell

The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying. — Steve Hanke

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year. — William J. Clinton

Thousands of Ohio families are going deeper and deeper in debt just trying to pay their heating bills, fill prescriptions, and buy groceries. The current minimum wage is simply not enough. — Sherrod Brown

This was the second job she had lost in the last eight months, and for the same reasons. Not a people person. Not a self-starter. Showed no initiative. She wanted to argue that minimum-wage jobs such as this shouldn't require initiative. She knew how to live inside an hour, how to weather the slow passing of time. She could endure boredom better than anyone she knew. Wasn't that enough? Apparently not. — Laura Lippman

I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me. — Henry Rollins

It matters whether the government blows tens of billions of dollars on tax loopholes for billionaires or whether that same money is used to lower costs for students who have to borrow money to go to college. It matters whether Wall Street can pocket billions of dollars by cheating people on mortgages and tricking them on credit cards or if there's a cop on the beat to keep them honest. It matters whether the minimum wage is set so low that a full-time worker still lives in poverty or if minimum wage also means a livable wage. When — Elizabeth Warren

I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law. — Chris Rock

Congress has not raised the minimum wage since 1997. The minimum wage is now at its lowest level in 50 years adjusted for inflation. — Russ Carnahan

MILWAUKEE- President Barack Obama went to Milwaukee on Monday to talk up an improving economy and push Congress to boost the minimum wage. — Anonymous

If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it, but it isn't. If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that's replacing jobs and people is only going to be accelerated. — Marco Rubio

Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity. — Marco Rubio

Going to a movie is a two-hour experience; at $7.50 for a ticket, you are valuing your time at far less than the minimum wage. If you don't understand the film, don't leave. If you understand it all too well and hate it, get out of your seat and walk up the aisle. You will feel empowered. — Gene Siskel

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. — Bill Maher

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. — Paul Krugman

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist. — Tom DeLay

I believe in raising the minimum wage and equal pay for work. — Hillary Clinton

This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks. — Paul Beatty

The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers. — Nick Hanauer

Most recently, Speaker of the House John Boehner (who has said he would commit suicide before voting to increase the minimum wage unless said increase were tied to massive tax cuts for the wealthy and their corporations)53 suggested that what's been holding back job creation in America is not the lack of employment openings but "this idea that has been born . . . that you know, I really don't have to work . . . I think I'd rather just sit around."54 According to conservative leaders, many Americans actually enjoy long-term unemployment. — Tim Wise

The record is replete with witnesses reporting that they were intimidated
by various authorities. Could all of them, unconnected and unknown to
each other, be having the same fantasies? And if the threats were real, the
obvious question is: why would any law enforcement officer at any level,
or any anonymous phone caller, for that matter, threaten someone if the
assassination was the result of a random act by a lone nut that was no longer
alive? But this is akin to asking why any information about the murder
of John F. Kennedy was ever withheld, let alone still withheld after fifty
years, on the grounds of "national security" if Lee Harvey Oswald was a
minimum-wage loser, with no conspirators, who was out to impress his
estranged wife. — Donald Jeffries

Whether it's raising the minimum wage, fixing our broken immigration system or supporting an economic climate that gives our businesses that chance to succeed, I hope to continue to fight these important battles on behalf of my constituents. — Joseph P. Kennedy III

Don't let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs, — Hillary Clinton

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high. — Arthur Laffer

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing. — Sherrod Brown

Anyone who's tried to pay a heating bill, fill a prescription, or simply buy groceries knows all too well that the current minimum wage does not cut the mustard. — Sherrod Brown

But I also want to give them a pathway so that they can earn citizenship, earn a legal status, start learning English, pay a significant fine, go to the back of the line, but they can then stay here and they can have the ability to enforce a minimum wage that they're paid, make sure the worker safety laws are available, make sure that they can join a union. — Barack Obama

To all you who believe we shouldn't have a minimum wage
that the minimum amount you can be paid should be determined solely by your employer, we tried it once before: it was called slavery. — Quentin R. Bufogle

The backlash against women's rights would be just one of several powerful forces creating a harsh and painful climate for women at work. Reagonomics, the recession, and the expansion of a minimum-wage service economy also helped, in no small measure, to slow and even undermine women's momentum in the job market. But the backlash did more than impede women's opportunities for employment, promotions, and better pay. Its spokesmen kept the news of many of these setbacks from women. Not only did the backlash do grievous damage to working women C it did on the sly. — Susan Faludi

Obama's gonna play Santa Claus with the minimum wage. He's got no successes to brag about. He cannot talk about a robust job market. In fact, the very fact he's talking about the minimum wage is evidence there is no robust job market. — Rush Limbaugh

Growing up in rural Utah had a lot of benefits, but in an environment that prized conformity, fit wasn't one of them. I ended up in my senior year with a 0.9 GPA, which I think you actually have to work pretty hard to get. In the exact same month they kicked me out of school, my girlfriend - still my wife today - told me she was pregnant. So, it was an interesting start to life: working 10 or 12 minimum-wage jobs; getting bored really quickly and quitting; having my in-laws - rightly - in full panic mode and thinking I had some kind of character flaw. — L. Todd Rose

The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie
but only if she is paid the minimum wage. — Irving Kristol

Is it really necessary to reward the CEO with several million dollars? Why isn't it logical or common sense to pay the minimum-wage employee another quarter, give a quarterly fifty-dollar bonus, or even provide a two-hundred-dollar gas gift card? — John-Talmage Mathis

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. 42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people's incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more - and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. 43 Poverty is two-faced - a matter of income and expenses, input and output - and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact. — Matthew Desmond

Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it. — Walter E. Williams

Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it's a popular thing to do as well. — Nancy Pelosi

I grew up working for the minimum wage at Hardee's and knows first hand how important the minimum wage is. I support a state based minimum wage so every state can set their own minimum wage based on their cost of living. — Joni Ernst

I know in the past Republicans have agreed to minimum-wage increases that there's built-in protections for small and midsize businesses. — Marco Rubio

We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage. — Iris Dement

This is a sensible response to employer concerns that the minimum wage is starting to have a damaging impact on competitiveness. — Digby Jones, Baron Jones Of Birmingham

How can anyone live off of minimum wage? — Tom Douglas

We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage. — Henry Ford

The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage. — Robert Reich

Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job. — Peter Schiff

Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum. — Karl Marx

When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business. — Fred DeLuca

Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially 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. — Murray Rothbard

Sharp increases in the minimum wage rate are also inflationary. Frequently workers paid more than the minimum gauge their wages relative to it. This is especially true of those workers who are paid by the hour. An increase in the minimum therefore increases their demands for higher wages in order to maintain their place in the structure of wages. And when the increase is as sharp as it is in H.R. 7935, the result is sure to be a fresh surge of inflation. Once again, prudence dictates a more gradual increase in the wage rate, so that the economy can more easily absorb the impact. — Richard M. Nixon

I thought I was answering a question that I had heard that was about increasing the minimum wage - would I consider that. So let me just go on record and say this: I am not for decreasing the minimum wage. I did not say that and that is not something I would consider. — Linda McMahon

We took the position we wanted our people to be better than minimum wage, so we're going to pay better than minimum wage, and we still do that. — Kenneth Langone

Can't get around the old minimum wage, Mortimer. — Dan Aykroyd

Raising the minimum wage a lot across the board would make a big difference. It's not the only thing, but it's an indispensable part of solving the problem. — Nick Hanauer

Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year - or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent. Westerners — Sebastian Junger

It's your decision to work for less than minimum wage — D. Jackson

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists. — Christina Romer

When you think of the amount of turnover and profit made by most companies in this country - and especially the big chains, it's a shame that they pay their employees minimum wage and no more than that. What that really says is: 'We're paying you minimum wage, because we're not allowed to pay you any less. — Christina Engela

Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable. — Thomas Perez

Of course, such judicial misconstruction theoretically can be cured by constitutional amendment. But the period of gestation of a constitutional amendment, or of any law reform, is reckoned in decades usually; in years, at least. And, after all, as the Court itself asserted in overruling the minimum-wage cases, it may not be the Constitution that was at fault. — Robert H. Jackson

Mr. Speaker, the time for an increase in the minimum wage has not just arrived; it is long overdue. — Sherwood Boehlert

Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combatting the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are modest. The more ambitious such a law is, the larger the number of workers it attempts to cover, and the more it attempts to raise their wages, the more likely are its harmful effects to exceed its good effects. — Henry Hazlitt

Liberals state that many teenagers would rather sell crack for $100 an hour than to flip hamburgers for a minimum wage. Using the same liberal logic, you might think it would make more sense for the average middle-class worker to rob banks rather than work a forty-hour week? The reason why most people, rich and poor, do not commit crimes because they know it is wrong to do so. — Rush Limbaugh

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack. — Elizabeth Warren

I think the minimum wage ought to keep pace with inflation. — Mitt Romney

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

One day I said to my dad, 'Are you disappointed that I'm working a minimum-wage job and I didn't go to college?' I'll never forget his response. He said, 'It's not about how much money you make or what your job is, but it's more about your character. For that, I'm proud of you.' — Josh Dun

After finishing art school I was applying to stores like Home Depot and Walmart. You know, places where you have to take a urine test before you get your minimum wage. Even those places wouldn't hire me. So I was lucky when I got included in a group show at the Richard Heller gallery that kind of started my art career. — Marcel Dzama

The problem with saying "the personal is political" is twofold: You politicize what is personal ("Everyone must celebrate my lifestyle!") and you personalize the political ("Your opposition to the minimum wage hurts my feelings!").
This is how you un-think yourself out of a civilization; When politics becomes a fashion choice and fashion becomes political. If you wear your politics on your sleeve, it usually means you don't keep them in your brain where they belong. — Jonah Goldberg

During Seattle's successful campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage, our opponents would sometimes roll their eyes and snort, 'If $15 is so good, why not $50?' It was a straw man argument: Nobody was proposing a $50 minimum wage; it would have been too high, and we said so. — Nick Hanauer

The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years. — John Raese

Oftentimes when you have the federal government or others step in and start to raise minimum wage, what happens is you take away or reduce some people's opportunity to grab the bottom rung of the economic ladder to get the opportunities and the skills that you need to move up that economic ladder. — Kevin Madden

I think changing the Democratic Party platform [at the convention] is a great place to start. It should include expanding Social Security, a $15 minimum wage, and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street - among other Sanders priorities. — Ben Wikler

Plain and simple, Congress must act to meet the needs of our constituents. We can do that by strengthening families, increasing the minimum wage, and ensuring equal pay for equal work. — Paul Tonko

Once again, the Republicans in the Senate have rejected an increase in the minimum wage. They support tax breaks for multi-millionaires, but they oppose helping the working poor to earn a decent income. — Mark Dayton

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