Leaderless and increasingly infuriated because of their paltry wages, the armies brutally crashed through the city, then a papal stronghold, leaving destruction and devastation in their wake.

Such paltry wages as you bring me from your teaching are hardly more than might be made by one or two well-considered contracts.

In reality, workers had to pay for things out of their paltry wages, while the compounds themselves were notorious for disease, malnutrition, and death.

At age seventeen, she was one of eighty thousand young Cuban men and women sent to Eastern Bloc countries to work for paltry wages.

After witnessing the paltry wages of working session musicians they turned to production.

She says: 'They are absolutely ripe for exploitation and are working long hours for paltry wages.'

To many of them, it is a sullen job of dark, cramped spaces, quick-tempered customers, paltry wages and an inexhaustible flow of auto exhaust.

There he saw migrant workers, men without futures, breaking their backs all day for paltry wages and at night throwing away their cash in card games and barrooms.

This is precisely the same as current Tory rhetoric: force people into often wholly unsuitable and thus unsustainable jobs at a paltry minimum wage, or they lose some or all of their benefits.

Both unhappy with their contract, they claimed that they were not receiving any royalties from their hits and were being paid a paltry wage for their work.