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A labourer in Elizabeth’s reign can expect to earn 4d per day – not enough for food for his family and himself, let alone clothes and other requirements. Dr Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England II: The Rich, BBC 2013The more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. Karl Marx, ‘Wage, Labour and Capital’
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but ‘servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds’, who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. ‘No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable’, he wrote. ‘It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged’. The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith’s view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. Jerry Z Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
But the idea that low wages may have contributed to the crisis is gaining ground. Masters of Money III: Marx, BBC 2012
To compare the reward which he gets for that labour with the wealth which pours into the pockets of the landlord purely owing to the possession of his monopoly is a piece, if they will forgive me for saying so, of insolence which no intelligent man would tolerate ... This system is not business, it is blackmail. Lloyd George, address Edinburgh Castle, Limehouse, London 30 July 1909
I was telling you I went down a coalmine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining around us and above us to crush us in.
You could see the pit-props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites: the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives in that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know, these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? They scowl at us, and we say: Only a ha’penny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! And ithey turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand. ibid.
Mortimer: We seem to be paying some of our employees an awful lot of money.
Winthorpe: You can’t get around the minimum wage, Mortimer. Trading Places 1983 starring Dan Aykroyd & Eddie Murphy & Ralph Bellamy & Don Ameche & Denholm Elliott & Jamie Lee Curtis & Kristin Holby & Paul Gleason & Robert Curtis-Brown & James Belushi & Kelly Curtis & Frank Oz & Bo Diddley, director John Landis
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages. Terry Pratchett
If workers are more insecure, that’s very healthy for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. Noam Chomsky
Wages and incomes have either stagnated or even significantly declined in the last twenty/twenty-five years … People are working longer … working conditions are much worse … Noam Chomsky, lecture 1999, ‘Case Studies in Hypocrisy: US Human Rights Policy, Rhetoric and Practice’
Real wages are about 15% below what they were in 1973. Noam Chomsky, lecture MIT 22nd February 1999, ‘Foundations of World Order’
It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family. Christopher Lasch
Around me I saw women overworked and underpaid, doing men’s work at half men’s wages, not because their work was inferior, but because they were women. Anna Howard Shaw
No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage. Benjamin Todd Jealous
It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year’s salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks’ paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked – because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed? Michael Moore, Here Comes Trouble
How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult? John Maynard Keynes
... I walked to him, where he stood behind the counter, gloating over the overflowing cash-drawer, and said: ‘While you've got that drawer open, may I have my wages, please?’
He counted out my money, less insurance, very slowly, and, it seemed to me, grudgingly. Then he passed it over to me, but when I reached to take it he drew it back. He held it where I couldn’t reach it, and weighed it in his hand, smiling at me. Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room
An evil-minded worldly or unconverted person might possibly sum up the matter thus: These people required this work done: they employed this woman to do it, taking advantage of her poverty to impose upon her conditions of price and labour they would not have liked to endure themselves. Although she worked very hard, early and late, the money they paid her as wages was insufficient to enable her to provide herself with the bare necessities of life. Then her employers, being good, kind, generous, Christian people, came to the rescue and bestowed charity, in the form of cast-off clothing and broken victuals. 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.
These are some of the lowest paid workers in Britain. No-one earns more than £4 a week for up to 27 hours work … There are more than 50,000 men and women in Britain today who are being paid similar wages. They’re all either physically disabled, mentally handicapped, mentally ill or just old. World in Action: Working for a Pittance, ITV 1978
Britain’s day-centre and hospital workshops. ibid.
Companies across Britain are in the spotlight on pay. Now the government’s making large companies declare their gender pay gaps. But is your boss playing by the rules? Dispatches: The Truth About Your Pay, Channel 4 2018
A new industry has sprung up offering advice on the reporting legislation. ibid.