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Join the Union, girls, and together say, Equal Pay for Equal Work! Susan Brownell Anthony, 1820-1906
When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait that long. Lya Sorano
Although it is true that only about 20 per cent of American workers are in unions, that 20 per cent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts. Molly Ivins
Poorly paid labour is inefficient labour the world over. Victor Hugo & Henry George
As the sun shines I will make hay
To keep failure at bay
For there remainest a pay
For my honest toil each day. Ogwo David Emenike
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair, ‘I, Candidate for Governor’
Of course I’m going to do something; I’m going to dock his pay. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s4e16: The Bar Association, Quark, re Rom who had just collapsed
We will resist the calls that have been made for direct regulation of executive pay. Kitty Ussher, Treasury economic secretary
What a man does for pay is of little significance; what he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world’s beauty, is everything! H P Lovecraft
The candles burn their sockets,
The blinds let through the day,
The young man feels his pockets
And wonders what’s to pay. A E Housman, Last Poems, 1922
The answer has its roots in the other major social development of the 1980s: the enrichment of the rich. This has been so stupendous as to defy statistics. In all the countries of the world, including the poor countries, the rich have been enjoying the greatest bonanza ever. The top 10 per cent of incomes in the United States of America, already far, far ahead of the rest of the population, increased their share of the wealth by another 7 per cent. In Britain the value of shares on the stock exchange multiplied five times between 1983 and 1987, and even the stock exchange crash of 1987 did not stop the fantastic accumulation of riches for the already super-rich.
Old-fashioned ideas, especially in publicly owned state industries, that the chairmen and managing directors should keep their earnings down as an example to their workers, vanished. As the public utilities in Britain were turned, ‘in the interests of competition’, from public monopolies to private monopolies, the chairmen and directors rewarded themselves for what they assessed as their ‘true worth’ – and promptly doubled and tripled their salaries. Enormous fortunes were flaunted by the millionaires’ press. At the start of the decade there were only a handful of billionaires in the world: at the end there were 157. Millionaires increased four times – from half a million to two million.
Tax-cutting everywhere aided the process. The highest rate of income tax in Britain was cut from 83 per cent at the start of the decade to 40 per cent at the end. With this went cuts in all the taxes which affected the rich: corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax. The poll tax, in abolishing property rates, put further millions into the pockets of the already rich. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch4
The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market reward for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
Low Pay Britain: The truth behind the government’s glowing job statistics. We reveal how workers at one of Britain’s biggest brands can be on as little as £3.08 an hour before expenses. Tonight: Low Pay Britain, Channel 4 2015
Tonight – struggling to make ends meet on low pay. The families forced to make heartbreaking decisions. Britain’s low-pay hotspots, and the companies named and shamed ... Almost six million working people are still struggling to survive on low pay in Britain today. Tonight: Does Work Pay? ITV 2015
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. 20th century maxim
Chief Executives’ salaries have gone through the roof ... This obsession with comparisons. Lord Haskins, former chairman Northern Foods
There’s been talk about fatcats in the public sector, but it’s nothing compared to the annual compensation that say the Chief Executive of Habitat gets. Anna Coote, New Economics Foundation head of social policy
He is well paid that is well satisfied. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice IV i 416
The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who’s going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month? Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
96,496. With some firms it is customary to call out the names of the men and pay them in order of seniority or ability, but there was no such system here; the man who got to the aperture first was paid first, and so on. The result was that there was always a miniature ‘Battle of Life’, the men pushing and struggling against each other as if their lives depended upon their being paid by a certain time. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
This made 40 hours a week, so that those who were paid sevenpence an hour earned £1.3.4. Those who got sixpence-halfpenny drew £1.1.8. Those whose wages were fivepence an hour were paid the princely sum of 16/8d, for their week’s hard labour, and those whose rate was fourpence-halfpenny ‘picked up’ 15/-. ibid.
Councillor Rushton said that several influential ratepayers and employees of labour had complained to him about the high wages of the Corporation workmen, some of whom were paid sevenpence-halfpenny an hour. ibid.
Samuel Eto’o is reputedly the highest-paid player in the world at £350,000 per week – that’s £5,000 a day. Clive Tyldesley
After the war, the Wages Councils Act 1945 was the occasion both for the expansion of the trade boards sectors into the service sector, and for a more general attempt to place institutional wage determination on a secure footing. Simon Deakin & Gillian Morris, Labour Law
The Labour government of 1964-70 took more direct powers in the area of pay restraint. ibid.
The Labour government of 1974-1979, in common with its immediate predecessors, failed to reconcile the tension between the traditional forms of state support for voluntary collective bargaining and increasing intervention in the economy through incomes policies. ibid.
Us Brits are seven times more likely to tell someone we’re having an affair than tell them what we earn. What Britain Earns with Mary Portas, Channel 4 2016
The guys at the top of the rich list this year, they made their money out of metal and property: £13,100,000,000. ibid.
Jeremy Clarkson recently said it was disgusting that other people know what others are paid. ibid.
Guess how much Lewis Hamilton took home last year: £88 million. ibid.