Jan Schakowsky Quotes

We have to raise the minimum wage.

We must ensure American workers get the long-overdue raise they deserve.

I believe in $15 as a minimum wage.

It is time this Congress listened to the American people and minimum-wage workers, and it is time that we act.

We must organize. We must protest. We must cry out in a loud voice that America needs a raise. We must keep working until workers in this country don't have to struggle to make ends meet.

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.

If you look at the future of the Democratic Party, things like raising the minimum wage - Democrats need to get behind raising the minimum wage and be clear on where we stand on trade deals.

The value of the minimum wage shouldn't be eroded, and it has been.

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.

Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it's a popular thing to do as well.

We never accept low wages as the driving force for employment or growth.

An industry that can not pay its workers a decent living wage has no right to exist.

living wage

We must use every tool at our disposal to lift the living standards of low-wage employees.

We need to see the FLSA and the minimum wage as part of a larger struggle to cut poverty and to address the challenge of income inequality.

I think that people need a livable wage.

As more and more people demand fair pay, the Government and big corporations are going to have to take notice.

I was on the committee that helped raise the minimum wage here in Seattle. I introduced a statewide bill to raise the minimum wage in Washington state my first year in the state senate, and I really believe that raising the federal minimum wage, while not the answer to everything, addresses a lot of the issues at the very bottom.

I don't expect to get a standing ovation from businessmen when I call for higher wages.

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.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

President Obama has made a minimum wage increase a focal point of his economic agenda.

In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works a full time job should have to live in poverty. That's a fundamental value proposition, an article of faith in our country that I know an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on.

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

When we talk about the minimum wage, we have to ask ourselves what it is that we owe both our workers and employers. I think clearly we owe them fairness.