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Laws protecting this right - whatever the level of the minimum wage, and whatever the Government chooses to call it - are only as strong as the threat of enforcement is both real and feared.
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.
Today, the Federal minimum wage purchases less than it has at any point in the last 50 years. Let me repeat: The Federal minimum wage purchases less than it has at any point in the last 50 years.
Literally, if we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.
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.
I think we've got to be competitive here in Illinois. It's critical we're competitive. We're hurting our economy by having the minimum wage above the national. We've got to move back to the national.
To improve the standard of living for working folks, we have to raise the minimum wage and empower workers to fight for their interests in an economic and political system that's stacked against them.
In the general economy, you get government involved in making market decisions - first of all, they're going to get it wrong. For a minimum wage, you will actually reduce the number of jobs available.
One of the biggest disagreements between Sen. Hagan and I - I don't believe we should be building an economy that's founded on making ends meet on minimum wage. It's impossible; it's a stepping stone.
I'm against having a Fed. It's socialism in its worst form. But until the Fed is gotten rid of, the only economic variable the poor have to counteract the injustices of the Fed is the minimum wage law.
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.
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.
Hillary Clinton understands that if someone in America this country works 40 hours a week, that person should not be living in poverty. She understands that we must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
The minimum wage in Denmark is about twice that of the United States, and people who are totally out of the labor market or unable to care for themselves have a basic income guarantee of about $100 per day.
By raising the minimum wage in California, 700,000 people are going to lose their jobs. There are a lot of opportunities for companies to prosper in Florida and compete here, and that's what I'm going after.
On my first day in office as President Quavo, I'd move my whole family into the White House. Second, I'd pull all the troops back. Third, I'd raise the minimum wage to a good, nice amount so people get paid.
You can't expect a woman who's holding down a part-time job to train for the biggest race in the world. She has to have a minimum wage, and I think it's something that is pretty crazy that we don't have that.
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.
The way China is looking to boost consumer spending is astounding. They are going to boost the minimum wage by 13 percent a year every year for five years... I don't know if people realize how dramatic that is.
Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country, was 'socialist.' The concept of the 'minimum wage' was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as 'socialist.'
I worked on minimum wage; I didn't go to college out of school. I worked multiple jobs, and it's probably not something Sen. Hagan's not had to worry about because we grew up in very different life circumstances.
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.
Raising the minimum wage is very efficient. Everybody's on the same playing field, it's a very simple rule, it doesn't require a lot of administration, you don't have to negotiate anything. It just is what it is.
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?
When I was a student at Princeton University, I was working part time in a grocery store. I saw an ad for teachers of a prep course. I don't remember what it paid, but it was easily double or triple the minimum wage.
The problem with one single minimum wage is that you don't allow for younger people, who are less skilled and maybe more easily pushed out of the job market, or that the minimum wage should vary for different regions.
On the campaign, I've had the privilege of advocating for important issues that affect all women, like demanding equal pay for equal work, pushing to raise our minimum wage, and promoting the idea of paid family leave.
What is the source of power of musicians who are financially browbeaten, most of whom work for minimum wage or less? Musicians who cannot even afford to buy tickets to operas or concerts in which they themselves perform?
Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.
One of the great constraints on economic growth and employment is that the tax and benefits system has grown up over generations and does not give the right incentives. Increasing the minimum wage does not solve this problem.
We focus sometimes too much on the minimum wage, and we should be talking about living wages and middle class wages and pensions and benefits and the kind of thing that people in the industrial Midwest talk about all the time.
I'd be 100 percent supportive of a minimum wage - kind of industry specific, maybe regionally specific - for guest workers, so that we're not creating incentives for employers to bring in immigrants to lower the price of labor.
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.
In passing the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998, the then-Labour Government did more than just establish the legal right to a minimum wage, significant as that was. More importantly, the Act made non-compliance a criminal offence.
The minimum wage is not something that you want to stay on as a permanent basis. For example, if you have a minimum wage job, you don't stay there 20 or 30 years. You don't put your children through college working on minimum wage.
Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.
When I was young, my dad, a veteran who attended college on the GI Bill, lost his job at age 55 when the company he worked for was sold. My entire family pitched in - my mom took in sewing, and I got a minimum wage job after school.
Most arguments for instituting or raising a minimum wage are based on fairness and redistribution. Even if workers are getting a competitive wage, many of us are deeply disturbed that some hard-working families still have very little.
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.
A market where chief executive officers make 262 times that of the average worker and 821 times that of the minimum-wage worker is not a market that is working well. And it is surely not working well enough to build a solid middle class.
I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.
The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade others. A billionaire and a minimum wage earner have the same power at the ballot box.
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.
I don't see the minimum wage as a fight between capital and labor, between persistent small businesses and diligent employees. I think offering New Mexicans a pathway out of poverty helps all of us, no matter which side of the check you sign.
The concept of minimum wage is crazy, if you really stop to think about it. If $8 an hour seems right, why not $20 an hour? If it's coming by order of the government, why stop at any level? Why not just say everyone should get what Gates gets?
My wife and I decided to try and kick start our kitchens to a $15 minimum wage for cooks. I've probably had to go through and raise every menu price now by 50 cents because it took away my profit. I just underestimated what it was going to cost.
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.
I wrote a script - a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn't get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.
The minimum wage now in our country, I think we've set that, so there are a lot of people have benefited from it in our country, but I think we ought to review how much it ought to be, and whether or not we ought to have increases in the minimum wage.
President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.