Tom Perez

“People have choices. They are going to vote with their feet.”

“When you put more money in the pockets of working families, they spend it on groceries, gas, school supplies, and other goods and services. And that helps businesses grow and create jobs. So many forward-looking employers, large and small, understand this.”

“I'm often accused of hiring people with civil rights experience, and I do plead guilty to that.”

“What we're doing here in America is we're making women choose between the family they love and the job that they need. No other nation on the planet is making these choices. In other countries, they've put politics aside and looked at the facts. When women succeed, the world succeeds. We're losing sight of that here in the USA.”

“The 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico are American citizens. They deserve fair and equal treatment as Americans.”

“If you're one car accident away from poverty, you're on a high wire without a safety net. And that's a challenging proposition.”

“As long as we're united, and as long as we continue to organize, invest, and lead with our values, we'll be unstoppable.”

“Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will benefit about 28 million workers across the country. And it will help businesses, too - raising the wage will put more money in people's pockets, which they will pump back into the economy by spending it on goods and services in their communities.”

“A secure retirement is one of the pillars of middle class life. For all too many Americans, however, that pillar needs more support.”

“I consider Keith Ellison a friend.”

“I was in the U.K. and Germany and went to Volkswagen and learned about their apprenticeship model - young people become paid apprentices in trades. It's not a coincidence that youth unemployment is far lower in Germany than the United States because there are paid opportunities for young people to get experience.”

“Smart growth is having the courage to say yes and having the courage to say no.”

“On Veterans Day, I can't help think of my uncles who volunteered for the service after fleeing a brutal regime in the Dominican Republic. They hadn't been in America long, but they were already so grateful for its opportunities that they were eager to serve.”

“We can't understand what we've accomplished on civil rights without telling the story of Bayard Rustin. And now, we must write the next chapter in the American civil rights story by drawing strength and inspiration from his moral courage.”

“I believe we're making a mistake if we regard job creation and job safety as mutually exclusive or inherently in conflict; they can and they must go hand-in-hand.”

“When you recruit good candidates and you have a good message and you have energy and organization and partnership, you always have a fighting chance.”

“The Democratic Party has learned from the terrible mistakes of the past. Our platform requires that we honor, fulfill, and strengthen the federal government's trust responsibility to American Indians. We take this responsibility seriously.”

“The employers who do best are employers who reject these false choices. It's not a zero-sum world where you either take care of your workers or you take care of your shareholders. You can do good and do well, too.”

“It is not possible that it is God's will that women are making 77 cents on a dollar.”

“I've heard the argument that unemployment benefits somehow act as a disincentive to the long-term unemployed when it comes to looking for work, but the opposite is true. Unemployment Insurance serves as a powerful incentive for people to keep searching for jobs, rather than drop out of the labor force altogether.”