My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.
David Korten

Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.
Lamar S. Smith

No one should be so naive as to think that wages among organized groups will not be increased, under pressure if necessary, to make up for increases in the cost-of-living, nor should anyone ordinarily object to such adjustments.
Charles E. Wilson

Now, wages in the automobile industry are made up of two components, what we call base rates and the cost of living factor which is fed in by the operation of the escalator.
Leonard Woodcock

Obviously, people with low or even moderate incomes could not afford such savings rates, and even diligent savings from their low wages would not be enough to pay for either retirement or healthcare.
William Greider

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
Terry Pratchett

President Kennedy understood the importance of equal pay for equal work and signed historic legislation that gave women around the country hope that one day their wages would be on par with that of their male counterparts.
Rosa DeLauro

Since Bush has been in office, African-American women have fallen behind in terms of income and wages.
Donna Brazile

Since NAFTA was put in place, Mexico has lost 1.9 million jobs and most Mexicans' real wages have fallen.
Stephen F. Lynch

Socialism is good when it comes to wages, but it tells me nothing when it comes to other questions in life that are more private and painful, for which I must seek answers elsewhere.
Karel Capek

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Thomas Sowell

The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities.
George Miller

The advance guard in the campaign for peace that America wages today must be the State Department.
Louis A. Johnson

The capitalists speculate on the two following factors: the female worker must be paid as poorly as possible and the competition of female labour must be employed to lower the wages of male workers as much as possible.
Clara Zetkin

The decree of a coercive tribunal would not need to conform to the true standard of wages, the final productivity of social labor. It would introduce into distribution a genuinely arbitrary element, with a very large ultimate power to pervert the natural system.
John Bates Clark

The demographic weight of countries such as China and India exercise a massive pressure on our wages and salaries. They have accomplished massive technological advances and the revolution in information technology has reduced the costs of transport.
Laurent Fabius

The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives.
Henry A. Wallace

The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.
Jim Hightower

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
David Herbert Lawrence

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Karl Marx