A Quote by Richard Ojeda

You can't take a coal miner making $95,000 a year, the only work in these parts where you can support a family without having to hold down three jobs at once... and tell them, 'You can make minimum wage,' or, 'We can give you job training for jobs that don't exist in West Virginia.'
If all you have is coal, that's the only thing that we have. Don't hate the coal miner for trying to get the only decent job that we have in West Virginia that can allow them to feed their family.
My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.
Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.
Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.
These teenagers [that drop out of school to take the higher wage jobs] take jobs that would go to unskilled adults, making it harder for those adults to make the transition from welfare to work.
You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.
To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.
In the last 15 years, only 500,000 jobs have been created per year. So from a long time ago, every year 700,000 Mexicans have only three routes to take: migration, the informal economy and the path to antisocial behavior.
The size of the U.S. middle class has been shrinking. Wages have been stagnant. We don't have those factory jobs that paid a living wage and enabled a family to have a home where the wife did not have to work. But we sent our factories abroad and there is no likelihood of getting them back. Equally worrisome is that some managerial jobs and professional jobs (such as lawyers) which support middle class life are threatened by automation.
If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it, but it isn't. If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that's replacing jobs and people is only going to be accelerated.
The most important thing we can do is to make sure that we are creating jobs in this country. But not just jobs, good paying jobs. Ones that can support a family.
Well, jobs are a great thing. You have to be a bit careful: If you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution and you’re going to go buy machines and automate things - or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction. And so within certain limits, you know, it does cause job destruction. If you really start pushing it, then you’re just making a huge trade-off.
If you wanted to pursue some kind of artistic pursuit and you had another career, then you would definitely fall back on it because it would take so long. I never believed I could do two things at once. The jobs I had were minimum wage jobs that you wouldn't want to pursue for too long, or that couldn't really take over your life.
I've always been able to work as an actor and support my family and did great jobs, and more often than not, I got to turn down jobs that I didn't really want to do for various reasons or refuse to work with people I didn't like - and there are quite a few.
Don't let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs.
Feminists often discuss women having two jobs: work and children. True. But no one discusses those divorced and remarried men who have three jobs: work, and two sets of children to nurture and financially support.
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