Political Quotes

“Mr. Jeffries, thank you very much for having us here to talk about the importance of wages and labor unions in our country. I want to thank my friend from the Empire State of New York for putting this together. This is very important and very timely as we try to pull our country out of the economic glut that it was in, as we are turning things around and we're getting job numbers back and things seem to be getting better slowly but surely. But we want to make sure, as things get better, people have a living wage, one where they can earn a good salary and have dignity and respect and be able to feed their families and take care of them. I was listening to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) talk about his life when he was growing up and the importance that labor unions played in his life. I can tell you, when I was in high school, that I worked at a grocery store and it was a union grocery store, probably the only one in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. I remember, we had benefits. We had time and a half. We were paid extra on holidays. We were young people, but we were allowed to make a little extra money. No one got rich off it, but at least when we were working extra on those days that people would normally have off, when we worked those extra hours during the summer and when school was out, we were compensated for it and compensated for it fairly. I am really proud of that.…”