wages

It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor the world over.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government.

The laborer is worthy of his hire.

...I don't want security - to be self-assured - I want to risk my heart in making your portrait and be paid the wages of your devotion...

The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1

If the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one__ clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday.

If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.

There is a deeper satisfaction if you earn from your own work than relying on corruptible ways of amassing riches.

Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter," thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience.

But the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profits.

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year__nd setting their compensation for themselves__re not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

He who makes $25,000 annually through passive income is more enviable than he who earns $100,000 annually through a salary.

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?

The Wages Of Sin Is Death