low wage workers Quotes

“It’s humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself–your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience–to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package.”

“Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.”

“Some economists argue that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no real ‘labor shortage,’ only a shortage of people willing to work at the wages currently being offered.”

“My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”