Stephen F. Lynch Quotes

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

I fundamentally believe that politics is counterintuitive. The left think they're helping working people by providing more rights, but all that actually happens is you create poverty and despair, because jobs go to your competitors who have fewer rights for workers.

But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Unfair trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement eviscerated good-paying manufacturing jobs, putting more than 3 million U.S. workers out of work.

The data on worker displacement after NAFTA reads like a funeral program for the middle class.

The difference between the Chinese workers and foreign workers lies in the fact that the latter are oppressed only by their own capitalists and not by those of other countries.

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.

Growing inequality is exacerbated by the companies who simply treat workers as commodities, and our governments are cowered by their demands to perpetuate this model of greed.

Nafta has been responsible for a race to the bottom in standards across North America, with working conditions declining along with wages.

Products made in China are cheap through the exploitation of the workforce. Every time we shop, we are driving the nail further into the coffin of American manufacturing jobs.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

Parallel to our vast strides in technology, there is a dangerous rise in unemployment, foreclosures, and degrading education. Millions of people are stricken with hopelessness and strife. Sadly, in the name of progress we have polluted the air, water, soil and the food we eat.

Everything is produced by the workers, and the minute they try to get something by their unions they meet all the opposition that can be mustered by those who now get what they produce.

Since NAFTA was put in place, Mexico has lost 1.9 million jobs and most Mexicans' real wages have fallen.

In the 'Nike Economy,' there are no standards, no borders and no rules. Clearly, the global economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

In America, you complain about job losses because of China, but here, we carry all of the environmental costs.

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time.

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist … The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

I don't think we should sell out the American worker. That's why I am opposed to NAFTA.

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny

The reigning model of economic globalization threatens earth’s life systems, undermines cultural integrity and diversity, and endangers the lives of many who are poor in order that some might consume exorbitantly and a few accumulate vast wealth.

Unfettered free trade has been a disaster not only for Americans but for the working people of Mexico and Canada as well.

There are few areas so advantages to the use of slaves as gold mining.