Wages Quotes

“I bargained with Life for a penny,
and Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;

Life is a just employer.
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial's hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid”
― Jessie B. Rittenhouse

“The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth. Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?”
― John Maynard Keynes

“It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked -- because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?”
― Michael Francis Moore, Here Comes Trouble

“If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages. ”
― Michael Harrington

“Employees keep the business doing what it does. It's important to pay them accordingly.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Since the war I have stressed altogether five main objectives. The true union of Europe; the union of government with science; the power of government to act rapidly and decisively, subject to parliamentary control; the effective leadership of government to solve the economic problem by use of the wage-price mechanism at the two key-points of the modern industrial world; and a clearly defined purpose for a movement of humanity to ever higher forms.”
― Oswald Mosley

“It is more profitable to give wages than to receive them.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script

“Employees should be paid on time and in full every time.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“It is the principal paradox of this period that the only sphere of our economic system in which government intervention is urgently necessary is also the only point at which action of the State is now effectively inhibited. It is in the region of wages and prices that we really require the continual economic leadership of government, but in our prevailing trade structure any such suggestion has come to be regarded as impious.”
― Oswald Mosley

“While the existing practitioners in a given field may be adequately (or even excessively) rewarded for their performance level, there may nevertheless be a case to be made for raising salaries in a particular field, in order to attract a higher caliber of person, capable of a higher level of performance, than the current norm in that field. This argument might be made for school teachers but it applies even more so to politicians and judges. Yet people who are preoccupied with merit are highly susceptible to demagogues who denounce the idea of paying politicians, for example, more money that they clearly do not deserve, in view of their current dismal performances. To get beyond this demagoguery requires getting beyond the idea of considering pay solely from the standpoint of retrospective reward for merit and seeing it from the standpoint of prospective incentives for better performances from new people.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“80% of teachers teach just to earn a salary. The rest of them teach purely to impart knowledge.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Before You Doubt Yourself: Pep Talks and other Crucial Discussions

“Employment is a social thing and not just a transactional thing. Good salaries and wages are good. Perks and benefits are good. But also, having managers and leaders in place who are kind and genuine and caring towards employees - having that type of atmosphere at the company - that contributes a lot to employee happiness and employee productivity.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“A living wage should be high enough that two parents working full time could support a family of four above the poverty line.”
― David Gottstein, A More Perfect Union: Unifying Ideas for a Divided America

“A living wage provides the basics of food, clothing, and shelter along with access to transportation and basic health care without further government assistance.”
― David Gottstein, A More Perfect Union: Unifying Ideas for a Divided America

“To the extent the fully able-bodied or partially able-bodied, are able enough to provide a service, they should be required to do so.”
― David Gottstein, A More Perfect Union: Unifying Ideas for a Divided America

“Certainly, the Negro has been deprived. Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was, during all those years, robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“How much money would I have to take from you so I don’t lose your respect?”
Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. “A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent.”
“And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody’s respect.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“It was a full-time job that paid like a part-time job.”
― Shea Serrano, A Wedding Thing

“Without improvement in the economics of each nation how can there be better wages for it's citizens”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Improving working conditions is as necessary as improving wages for a better welfare of humanity.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“What is the beggar society? The beggar society is a society that rejoices by wagging its tail like a dog with a bone thrown in front of it, when a wage much less than the wage he deserves is given to him by the government!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The collectivists say, 'To each according to his deeds'; or, in other terms, according to his share of services rendered to society. They think it expedient to put this principle into practice, as soon as the social revolution will have made all instruments of production common property. But we think that if the social revolution had the misfortune of proclaiming such a principle, it would mean its necessary failure; it would mean leaving the social problem, which past centuries have burdened us with, unsolved.

Of course, in a society like ours, in which the more a man works the less he is remunerated, this principle, at first sight, may appear to be a yearning for justice. But in reality it is only the perpetuation of injustice. It was by proclaiming this principle that wagedom began, to end in the glaring inequalities and all the abominations of present society; because, from the moment work done began to be appraised in currency, or in any other form of wage, the day it was agreed upon that man would only receive the wage he should be able to secure to himself, the whole history of a state-aided capitalist society was as good as written; it was contained in germ in this principle.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Every worker deserves a good wage.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“If u want ppl 2 deliver u groceries & goods but don't want to hold the corporations they work for accountable for PPE, thriving wages, hazard pay, & taxes, you're exploiting cheap labor for your own safety. We won't survive on exploitation. We only survive through solidarity.

(4/1/2020 on Twitter)”
― Nikkita Oliver

“In some ways the most striking novelty in Keynesian doctrine was that
(abstracting from effects on foreign trade) an all-round reduction in
wages would not reduce unemployment and (introducing Kalecki’s
elaboration) would actually be likely to increase it. [p. 129]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“Workers deserves fair wages.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Beside him was a small employee sweeping the floor, just by Andrei. The cleaner clenched the broom with effort and quick movements. She moved forcefully, with so much vigor that one saw a girl scout. But wrinkles had already formed on her neck, that sweated, moistening her black wig. Andrei stared, noticing she was damn good at her job, but too good. She would bend her legs to sweep the difficult corners of the shop. The woman would adjust the picture frames on the wall and wipe down the chairs, tasks which were not part of her required duties. Whenever her co-workers talked casually, the woman steered the conversation to the topic of the conditions of the store, which she knew, or to certain customers, who she knew, or to how business was, which she knew. She drove back home with a smile, knowing she’d done a great job that day. “They need me! Otherwise, who else would have caught the slip hazard by the trash? No one, not even my manager!” she would say before bed. She was naturally helpful. It was tragic to see that kind employee, happy like a little child, be so great at some stupid shop, when in her pumped a heart large enough to fuel the future, a forest, or a country. There was no structure of life, or invention yet created, whose mechanism could righteously allocate the innocence and love embedded in the warm blood of a human being. There deserved to be. She was sacred. But the world, decidedly corporate, had seized her, eaten her up, devouring what was left of the lively.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost