Janet Yellen Quotes

As skills and energy became more of a demand, people who didn't have skills just got left behind, got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas.

Yet in this global economy, no jobs are safe. High-speed Internet connections and low-cost, skilled labor overseas are an explosive combination.

Since 2000, we have lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, of which 500,000 jobs were in high-tech industries such as telecommunications and electronics.

I think there is an enormous sea change happening in the global workforce. It has a lot to do with globalization. I think that people used to have a hope for a career or meaningful employment, and its been reduced to internships, part-time work or just grossly underpaid work.

I think Americans are probably getting sick of us Australians trying to take their jobs.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.

Every day more Americans watch their jobs being shipped overseas.

One of the great dilemmas for America will be that American companies will do very well while American workers might not.

Globalization has redefined the competition for employment and incomes in the United States. Tradeoffs will have to be made between the two.

People are worried about what’s going to happen to their jobs. There’s a lot of off-shoring and out-sourcing taking place. There’s a lot more mobility of labor and of people. Unless we explain what’s happening, people will resort to protectionism and xenophobia.

There is a large change coming in the jobs of America and competition from abroad. We should prepare for it rather than let history overwhelm us.

Human labor is becoming the cheapest of commodities.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing.

When American workers are losing their jobs to people in other countries, Washington cannot afford to ignore this disturbing trend any longer. While Democratic presidential candidates want to just blame U.S. corporations, the reality is that their strategy won't help protect American workers or save their jobs.

The United States faces structural employment problems because of the long-term effects of globalization and technology. This was only exacerbated by the Great Recession.

The rise of populism is in part a response to stagnating incomes and job loss, owing mostly to new technologies but widely attributed to imports and immigrants.

We need to wake up to the fact that it is not immigrants who are causing economic dislocations. It is technology and an evolving economy that is pushing more and more Americans to the sidelines.

I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.

Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premium for low-skilled workers in manufacturing is smaller than it once was.

Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are lower than they were 10 years ago, if you can believe that.