Thoughts of Famous Wages Quotes in English

The humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious.

Henry David Thoreau

If a market exists for low-paid work, then we should think about how we can make this type of work more attractive by providing government assistance. Of course, the wage-earner must be able to live off of his wages. We will not allow poverty wages or dumping wages. But the wage earner can receive a combined wage that includes both his actual wages and a government subsidy.

Angela Merkel

Paying people a fair wage is a sign of respect and acknowledgement of the value of people's contributions to the business. When people are treated fairly and with respect, they will provide unparalleled levels of support and commitment inside the business, and to clients and customers. Everyone is more successful when people are paid a living wage.

Amy B. Lyman

Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms.

Fulton J. Sheen

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate.

- Adam Smith

From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.

E. F. Schumacher

Competitiveness is defined as the ability of companies to compete while maintaining or improving the average standard of living. If you are cutting wages to become more competitive, that's not really more competitive. It's raising the skill and the efficiency of those workers so that they can support and sustain that higher wage.

Michael Porter

An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of purchasing power is wages.

Henry Ford

We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.

Nicholas von Hoffman

I cannot always sympathize with that demand which we hear so frequently for cheap things. Things may be too cheap. They are too cheap when the man or woman who produces them upon the farm or the man or woman who produces them in the factory does not get out of them living wages with a margin for old age and for a dowry for the incidents that are to follow. I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment will starve in the process.

Benjamin Harrison

In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of decent living.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Wages Quotes List

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Terry Pratchett Quotation

There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.

- David Ricardo

The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.

- A Quotation From Nick Hanauer

The wages of courage is death, lad, but it's the wages of everything else, too.

Tim Powers

Paying good wages is not charity at all-it is the best kind of business.

- Henry Ford

It is more profitable to give wages than to receive them.

- William S. Burroughs

Sin has the devil for its father, shame for its companion, and death for its wages.

Thomas Watson

You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

- Jim Rohn

Heaven never defaults. The wicked are sure of their wages, sooner or later.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Profits are better than wages. Wages make you a living; profits make you a fortune.

Jim Rohn

Don’t reduce your impacts to match what you earn.

- Israelmore Ayivor

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

- Ogden Nash Quotes

It is not how much you are paid that matters. But how much you get done that is most important.

- Lailah Gifty Akita

Companies prefer to put money in the pockets of shareholders or to hoard cash rather than to raise wages or invest.

Mariana Mazzucato

Of all men, Christians should work especially hard, giving more than an honest day's work for a day's wage.

- Richard D. Phillips

You can never really justify wages in the entertainment business, but it is what it is.

Gary Lineker

Raising wages abroad would be good for the U.S. economy, as it would give our own industries a much-needed chance to compete.

- Elizabeth Cline

There is a deeper satisfaction if you earn from your own work than relying on corruptible ways of amassing riches.

- Israelmore Ayivor

When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.

Mae West

Productivity is driven at the enterprise level. Better wages, better performing workplaces, are driven at the workplace level.

Bill Shorten

The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.

Gene Stratton-Porter

We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

If you look at the US economy over the last 15-20 years wages have been stagnating or even declining.

- David Korten *

A business owner can become rich exponentially and people who work for wages become rich incrementally.

Robert Kiyosaki

As far as wages are concerned, the only difference between immigration and birth is that birth takes longer.

Alex Tabarrok

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.

Adam Smith

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

H. L. Mencken

The caretaker needs to be taken care of, in wages and benefits. Not enough emphasis is put on the importance of these caretakers.

Chad Urmston

What we must seek is a plan by which the men will receive high wages when the employers are receiving high prices for the product.

Charles M. Schwab

I've never believed in lower wages. Never. Never believed in lower wages, I've never believed in lower wages as an economic instrument.

- John Howard

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.

- Milton Friedman

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

We can't continue to look on, when there are entire sectors where there are wages that don't provide a secure livelihood.

Matthias Platzeck

The world does not pay for what a person knows, but it pays for what a person does with what he knows.

- Laurence Lee

Wages Thought in English

Profits are better than wages.

- Jim Rohn

Your praises will become your wages.

William Shakespeare

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

- Thomas Carlyle

The wages of pedantry is pain.

- Carroll O'Connor

One man’s wage rise is another man’s price increase.

- Harold Wilson

Draw your salary before spending it.

- Artemus Ward

Pay the laborer his wages before his sweat dries.

- Nazr Mohammed

One man's wage increase is another man's price increase.

Harold Wilson

Paying good wages is not in opposition to good productivity.

James Sinegal

Give the laborer his wages before his perspiration be dry.

- Meccan

If a rise in wages does not raise prices, a fall will not reduce them.

- Joan Robinson

The most empowering thing you can do though is to create innovative ways to bring in livable wages. That begins with a debt free lifestyle.

- Brandi L. Bates

Good wages are pro business, since they reduce turnover, increase morale, produce better-skilled employees, and improve productivity.

Jim Hightower

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

Henry Ford

I’ve always been worried about people who are willing to work for nothing. Sometimes that’s all you get from them, nothing.

- Wages Quotes by Sam Ervin

If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.

Paul Krugman

Because he has finally realized that it is it and not him that is loved by the woman he loves, many a man is jealous of his own car, house, wardrobe, or salary.

- Mokokoma Mokhonoana

But the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profits.

- Michael A. McCarthy

The bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.

John Stuart Mill

If the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one’s clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday.

- Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Rising prices or wages do not cause inflation; they only report it. They represent an essential form of economic speech, sincemoney isjust another form of information.

Walter Wriston

Where wages are not regulated by law, all that we can pretend to determine is what are the most usual; and experience seems to show that law can never regulate them properly, though it has often pretended to do so.

- Adam Smith

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Henry Ford

The high wage begins down in the shop. If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity for work.

Henry Ford

Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.

- Karl Marx

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Karl Marx

But a rise in the wages of labour would not equally affect commodities produced with machinery quickly consumed, and commodities produced with machinery slowly consumed.

David Ricardo

Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of themarket, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.

David Ricardo

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

There never has been a time in our history when work was so abundant or when wages were as high, whether measured by the currency in which they are paid or by their power to supply the necessaries and comforts of life.

-Benjamin Harrison

Of course, it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.

Henry Ford

If you work for a man, in Heavens name work for him! If he pays you wages that supply your bread and butter, work for him, stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents.

Elbert Hubbard

If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.

Orestes Brownson

Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders.

Orestes Brownson

A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, unites in his own person the three different characters, of landlord, farmer, and labourer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second, and the wages of the third.

Adam Smith

In general foreign invested companies who come to America to start a company, to open a manufacturing business or whatnot, they actually provide much higher wages than American companies.

- Adam McKay

The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth.

Alex Jones

One of the reasons that Social Security is in so much trouble is that the only funding stream comes from people who get a wage. The people who get wages is declining dramatically. Most of the income in this country is made by people at the top who get dividends and - and capital gains.

Mike Huckabee

The high wage begin down in the shop. If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity for work.

- Wages Thoughts by Henry Ford

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.

- Barbara Ehrenreich

We are already well down the road toward a managed-trade regime. It would be far better to acknowledge that reality, and seek a set of reasonable rules, than to pretend that Ricardian trade is the norm and allow mercantilist states to overwhelm U.S. industry and ratchet down wages, in the name of free trade.

Robert Kuttner

I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina's wealth and power in their hands. So Peron and the government brought in an eight hour working day , sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go .

Evita Peron

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.

Adam Smith

The Economic Policy Institute reports that the average hourly wages paid to young college graduates hit a new low in the mid-1990s. Graduating into a strong economy versus a weak one could amount to as much as a 20 percent difference in wages over time.

- Ada Calhoun

The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages.

- Laurie Penny

To me, the labor movement was never just a way of getting higher wages. What appealed to me was the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship. You wanted the girl or the man who worked beside you to be treated just as well as you were, and an injury to one was the concern of all.

- Rose Schneiderman

Manner and morals have improved, improved wages and world travel during the war have had effect, and the farm labourer now is an intelligent, self respecting workman, on a level at least with the town artisan. The village rustic of the past no longer exists outside of the comic papers.

- Flora Thompson

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

If a man got two shillings weekly wages, and if his wages rose to four shillings, the rate of wages would have risen by 100 per cent. This would seem a very magnificent thing if expressed as a rise in the rate of wages, although the actual amount of wages, four shillings weekly, would still remain a wretchedly small, a starvation, pittance. You must not, therefore, allow yourselves to be carried away by the high-sounding per cents in the rate of wages. You must always ask: What was the original amount?

- Karl Marx

We have thus seen that even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion.

- Karl Marx

Our society is monstrously disjunctive, at once so efficient in war and so inefficient in caring for the welfare of its members. It is frightening to see people rooting in garbage pails on streets, living in cardboard crates under bridges, while their government wages war. Even when there is an emergency in a household, decent parents do not forget to feed the children.

Anne Truitt