Working Poor Quotes

“Why? So you can still qualify for assistance? Your family is gaming the system?"

"No." Diana had always hated when people said this about her family. The bosses who made her dad list a payroll company as his employer, they gamed the system. The assholes who convinced her parents to take out both a second mortgage and a HELOC in 2006 gamed the system. The employers who would never give Edith enough hours for benefits gamed the system. But ask a lot of people, and they'd tell you it's people like her grandma who game the system. They'd tell you that an old woman who's worked hard every day of her life and still struggles to get by is a malignant vacuum for their personal tax dollars, and a blight on their lives as free Americans. "We're just trying to live.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, The Lager Queen of Minnesota

“Well, the vast majority of people don't steal to get ahead. A lot of people work their way up from nothing without stealing."

"I don't think a lot of people work their way up from nothing, ever. People like you want to believe it happens all the time. But it really doesn't.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, The Lager Queen of Minnesota

“You think of killing him
on the spot
but discard that thought and
leave,
down into the urine-stinking
elevator,
they have you crucified too,
America at work,
where they rip out your intestines
and your brain and your
will and your spirit.
They suck you dry, then throw
you away.
The capitalist system.
The work ethic.
The profit motive.
The memory of your father’s words,
“work hard and you’ll be
appreciated.”
of course, only if you make
much more for them than they pay
you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems

“It's humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself--your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience--to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America