Quotes About Inequality

Policy and business elites did not speak frankly about the unequal distribution of benefits from trade and failed to adequately accompany market-opening with good domestic policies to equip displaced workers to upskill, adjust, and share in the new opportunities being created.

Free migration within Europe means that countries that have done a better job at reducing unemployment will predictably end up with more than their fair share of refugees. Workers in these countries bear the cost in depressed wages and higher unemployment, while employers benefit from cheaper labor.

The tech-driven economy leads to a two-tier job market where workers are either critical or 'commodity.' This divisive 'winner-take-all' mentality hurts most Americans and worsens economic inequality.

There is a great deal of sympathy amongst workers for the Occupy Wall Street movement. We understand their frustration.

Growing inequality is exacerbated by the companies who simply treat workers as commodities, and our governments are cowered by their demands to perpetuate this model of greed.

I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.

Workers' disillusionment is deepened by the knowledge that, as their average wages grow slowly or stagnate, the very wealthy are growing significantly wealthier.

During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being.

The competitive pressure to produce, buy, and sell to our global multi-national companies is so intense that contractors in supply chains are motivated to pay low wages, intensify exploitative conditions, keep workers fearful with insecure work contracts, or simply sack workers who have formed a union to fight back.

Because of their marginalised position in the economy, the mass of the workers carry the burdens of society.

I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.

In no country are all the people factory owners. The majority are workers.

In our economic structure, the people who work the hardest oftentimes make the least. I know migrant farm workers who do back-breaking labor every day, or Uber drivers and Lyft drivers who drive 10 to 12 hours a day in traffic. You can't be lazy doing that kind of work.

There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.

Lesser-skilled workers suffer the entire burden of lower wages but capture only a portion of the benefits from lower-priced offshore goods.

High-skilled workers increasingly choose lucrative jobs that don't serve or supervise low-skilled workers. Low-skilled productivity and wage growth has lagged as a result.

Unfortunately, we have to dial down low-skilled immigration. We have to recognize that there is more unemployment among the lesser-skilled workers than among the most-skilled workers.

When illegal labor is used, that almost always depresses wages paid to all workers. The illegal workers can be exploited, and they will usually accept lower wages. As a result, all workers in the plant, including U.S. citizens, will see their wages go down.

Let's not kid ourselves about just how cheap offshore labor really is. We not only pay substantially less per hour: we also avoid the costs we would incur if these workers immigrated here. We don't pay for their medical expenses when they show up in the emergency room without insurance.

The Supreme Court has increasingly come down on the side of big corporations instead of workers and middle-class families.

When corporations refuse to practice due diligence by not establishing grievance mechanisms for remedy of abuses against the hidden 94% of their workforce in their global supply chains, they perpetuate a depraved model of profit-making that has driven inequality to a level now seen as a global risk in itself.

Money isn't everything, but the gaps between rich districts and poor districts ultimately mean a workforce that won't be as competitive as it could be, and individual Coloradans won't be as successful as they could be.

The fact is that the rich are getting richer while the poor are being left behind. Women remain under-represented in boardrooms and under-engaged in the global workforce. Environmental change is leaving the poorest countries vulnerable. Voters are becoming more and more politically polarised and partisan.

Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.