Labor Economics Quotes

We cannot get control of our borders until we do something about… a man or woman who is making 50¢ an hour in Mexico and can make 10 bucks an hour and the United States for a job that Americans will not do.

People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.

You can keep raising it, but at some point, everybody who believes in a minimum wage will say, "No, wait a minute. That's too much," and at that point, you have demonstrated that that there's no market relationship. You're just talking emotion. You're just talking "fairness." You're just talking being nice, and that's not how the market works. People aren't paid a wage because they're being nice to, or because it's fair. In the market, the market rules.

Modern trade unions understood that deciphering a balance sheet was more important than decoding Das Kapital.

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

There's no question raising the minimum wage excessively causes a loss of jobs.

If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone - perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers' bottom lines.

As far as wages are concerned, the only difference between immigration and birth is that birth takes longer.

The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.

The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.

Wages tend to an equality in the same neighborhood and the same occupation.

Of course, it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.

Nowhere, in the farming portion of the United States, would slave labor be generally employed, if the proprietor were not tempted to raise slaves, by the high price of the Southern market which keeps it up in his own.

As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.

When it comes to jobs, jobs are just like products in the sense that the free market operates and sees that somebody gets paid what they're worth.

I find it remarkable that virtually all of the large difference in labor supply between France and the United States is due to differences in tax systems. I expected institutional constraints on the operation of labor markets and the nature of the unemployment benefit system to be more important. I was surprised that the welfare gain from reducing the intratemporal tax wedge is so large.

If women really earned fifty-nine cents to the dollar for the same work as men, what business could compete effectively by hiring men at any level?

Tax rates aren't everything with regard to incentives to work. I would probably work at a 100% tax rate next to a nude modeling studio. I'm joking, but you know what I'm saying. There's a lot more to it than just tax rates. It's economics that I do; I don't do nude modeling studio economics. People do respond to taxes.

Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.

The study titled 'Impact of Immigration on Wages, by Education Level, 1994-2007' found that increased immigration had an effect of lowering wages for earlier immigrants by an average of 4.6 percent. Running counter to popular perception is the finding that for native-born Americans, wages actually increased by 0.6 percent.

Marx's theory that only capitalists benefit from capitalism and workers are exploited was completely wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Workers earned more as economies grew.

Real wages for male workers in the United States are about what they were in the '60s.

There are some who incline to favor a “minimum wage,” but who “kick at” a “maximum price.” Such surely forget that the capitalist could here just as easily as in the case of a rise in wages compelled by a workmen’s combination, or by any other cause, take his old profits out at the other end by raising the price of the manufactured article.

Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold... has its natural and its market price.