Wage Theft Quotes

“If one tallied all of the losses suffered by victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined, the figure wouldn't even approach what is taken from hardworking Americans' pockets by employers who violate the nation's labor laws.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“America congratulates itself for abolishing slavery, yet El Paso Texas still run on a modern version of the same engine: migrants without papers, workers paid in promises, men and women laboring under the threat of deportation. The whip has been replaced by hunger, the chains by debt, the overseer by bureaucracy. When your employer holds your wages hostage, when you are told that calling the police could cost you your life, when hunger becomes a management strategy—what century are you living in?”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“They tell me I am free, yet every word I utter against abuse costs me another meal. I broke away from the hands that used me, but the system that enabled them still keeps its grip—tight, invisible, bureaucratic. I cannot call myself a survivor of human trafficking because survival implies safety. Captivity continues through retaliation, through the quiet violence of starvation, through the knowledge that the law can watch and do nothing.”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“This is the immigrant bargain in America: you can speak, but only if your truth does not inconvenience the powerful. And if it does? Then the punishment is hunger. The price of honesty is starvation. The cost of agency is suffering. So what does freedom mean to an immigrant when the truth is the only language America still refuses to translate? What kind of freedom is it when your survival depends not on how much English you speak, but on how much truth you can swallow just to be allowed to eat?”
― Samuel Martínez Roque

“That left Jeb to work for whatever the bosses offered under the National Right to Work Act--the minimum wage having been abolished--enough to keep them fed and the car gassed but not enough for a roof or to save much more than coins.”
― Karl Taro Greenfeld, The Subprimes

“It doesn't bother you that because of your credit you can't get a real job?' Sargam said. 'You a politician?' another man said. 'This is the greatest country in the world, or it was until the politicians and media ruined it, made it hard for business.' 'Hard for business?' Sargam said. 'Do you really think it's hard for business in America? How much are you getting an hour? Five dollars? Five fifty?' There were murmurs of assent from around the hillside. 'You're barely making enough to eat on and pay for the gas to get you to the next day's work.”
― Karl Taro Greenfeld, The Subprimes

“Wage workers are unconsciously trading their limited lifetime for abundant pieces of paper that are designed to steal their lifetime”
― Daniella Liberati