Quotes About Labor standards

When you work extra, you should be paid extra. That's what the Fair Labor Standards Act said. And I've met so many people who are working 60-70 hours a week, and they are effectively working 20 hours for free because they are making a little bit above the minimum wage, because the 2004 regulation enables employers to do that. That's not fair.

Time after time we're told corporations should have freedom from pesky job safety regulations, environmental protections and labor standards - giving working people the freedom to be crushed in collapsing mines, choke on filthy air and get paid too little to live on.

If we're going to pass international trade agreements, as we should, they should have similar kind of rules, not as high a wage as obviously as a steelworker in the U.S. or in Lorain, Ohio, but certainly rules on the environment and worker safety. You go to Mexico, you don't see those kinds of worker protections or environmental safeguards.

If we're going to do trade agreements, as we should, we need trade agreements with rules that will lift up all boats, rather than continuing to pull down U.S. food safety standards, U.S. worker wages, environment, all that these job losses and all that this has done to pull down our standards.

Time after time we're told corporations should have freedom from pesky job safety regulations, environmental protections and labor standards - giving working people the freedom to be crushed in collapsing mines, choke on filthy air and get paid too little to live on.

We should never seek to compete with economies in our region by cutting pay and conditions - that's a race to the bottom we can't win.

I do think we need to hold countries accountable who violate trade agreements that are already in place. We need to get stronger about enforcement, that in the future if we strike a trade agreement, toughening up labor standards and environmental standards and enforcement standards is something we absolutely need to do.

As I have said all along, for any trade promotion authority bill to gain my support, it must require strong, enforceable environmental and labor protections.

In the United States, constitutional guarantees of religious liberty protect the church from actions that might otherwise be considered abusive or in violation of laws in human trafficking or labor standards.

Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent.

If the Chinese business community takes the Declaration of Human Rights, core labor standards, and environmental standards seriously, the government of China will take them far more seriously, too.