These minimum wage quotes will inspire you. The minimum wage is the lowest wage that an employer is allowed to pay an employee, according to a law or agreement.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging minimum wage quotes, minimum wage sayings, and minimum wage proverbs.
Famous Minimum Wage Quotes
- “The real minimum wage is zero.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty-stricken.” ~ Milton Friedman
- “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
- “Raising minimum wage doesn’t just benefit the workers behind me, it creates a proven ripple effect that increases wages all the way up the scale. … Let’s get the facts straight, only 20 percent of people making the minimum wage are teenagers. The rest are hardworking adults, many of them with families, and I mean hardworking.” ~ Joe Biden
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“The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.” ~ Jerry Brown
- “Unskilled and inexperienced workers are the ones most often deprived of employment opportunities by increases in the minimum wage.” ~ Ron Paul
- “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
- “A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“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
- “When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it. Why do we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people?” ~ John Boehner
- “If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine.” ~ Marco Rubio
- “We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living-a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.” ~ Murray Rothbard
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“No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage. In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.” ~ Jon Corzine
- “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
- “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country… By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level – I mean the wages of decent living.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “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
- “Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially so 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
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“No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.” ~ Benjamin Jealous
- “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.” ~ John Raese
- “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
- “I thought in this country, the best social program was a job. Yet minimum wage jobs arent paying enough to keep families out of poverty” ~ Barbara Mikulski
- “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.” ~ Michele Bachmann
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“You get paid more at McDonald’s than you do under the existing minimum wage.” ~ Norm Coleman
- “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
- “Raising the minimum wage may poll well, but having a job that pays $10 an hour is not the American Dream. And our current government programs, offer at best only a partial solution. They help people deal with poverty, but they do not help them escape it.” ~ Marco Rubio
- “There’s no question raising the minimum wage excessively causes a loss of jobs.” ~ Mitt Romney
- “The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs – food, shelter, clothing.” ~ Sherrod Brown
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“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
- “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 bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.” ~ Jim Clyburn
- “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.” ~ Bill Pascrell
- “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
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“The minimum wage was due for an increase, but it was important that we offset its cost to small businesses.” ~ J. D. Hayworth
- “At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “Ohio is one of only two states that have a minimum wage below the federal level of $5.15 an hour.” ~ Sherrod Brown
- “[A] family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong. That’s why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher. Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.” ~ Barack Obama
- “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
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“Raising the minimum wage means raising the living wage – and that’s good news for Ohio.” ~ Sherrod Brown
- “It is time this Congress listened to the American people and minimum-wage workers, and it is time that we act.” ~ Russ Carnahan
- “These vessels are out of sight, out of mind. They are exempt from minimum-wage requirements, from Coast Guard inspections, OSHA regulations and other safety laws.” ~ Steve Finley
- “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 its coming by order of the government, why stop at any level? Why not just say everyone should get what Gates gets?” ~ Malcolm Wallop
- “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.” ~ Marcy Kaptur
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“6.6 million people will benefit from a rise in the minimum wage.” ~ Russ Carnahan
- “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 mode.” ~ Henry Hazlitt
- “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
- “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
- “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.” ~ Nick Hanauer
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“I believe in raising the minimum wage and equal pay for work.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “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
- “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
- “[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
- “I believe increasing minimum wage it`s not just the minimum wage, it`s a living wage.” ~ Alison Lundergan Grimes
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“Giving a minimum wage reduces inequality significantly.” ~ Winnie Byanyima
- “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
- “Pay minimum wage, you get minimum work. Nobody seems to get that.” ~ Sue Grafton
- “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
- “To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.” ~ Barack Obama
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“The minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people.” ~ Mitch McConnell
- “There are people who would like to get rid of minimum wage. But we have to have it, because if we didn’t some people would not get paid money. They would work all week for two loaves of bread and some Spam.” ~ Chris Rock
- “If you are a Jewish Israeli, you go to Gaza, you get the villa of your life, the villa which you did not dream of ever getting in Israel, a beautiful two-story villa with green meadows and so on, practically for nothing. Then you put up hothouses of tomatoes or flowers; you take the very Arabs from whom you grabbed this land and employ them as laborers in your hothouses. Israeli law does not apply in Gaza: There is no minimum wage, no annual vacation, no compensation for dismissal – so you get the work very, very cheap. It is a wonderful setup economically.” ~ Uri Avnery
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“I want people to make a lot more than $9. $9 is not enough. The problem is that if you can’t do that by mandating it in the minimum wage laws. Minimum wage laws never worked in terms of helping the middle class attain more prosperity.” ~ Marco Rubio
- “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
- “What we need to do is raise the minimum wage. We also need to hold onto equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That’s not right in America.” ~ John F. Kerry
A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their employees—the price floor below which employees may not sell their labor.
