Tony Blair Quotes

It's such a bullshit move. Transparently so. It's obviously supposed to give succor to people who feel pissed off because someone from another country got a job that they feel should've been given to them. But that's what people voted against here. They voted against the movement of labor - that kind of fluidity - because they want a Britain that no longer exists, and they can't get it.

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.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.

We always see shifts in employment. If you think about it, if you go back to 1800, it took 80 percent of the labor force to produce enough food for the country. Now it takes less than 3 percent. Well, the truth is that market systems move people around.

I don't think we replaced the Soviet Union with Al Qaida. I think we replaced, we should have, Soviet Union with the merger of globalization and the IT revolution. I think it's that. That is the real challenge that we face today. Unlike the Soviet Union, it has no face, it has no missiles, but it is something that challenges every job, every city and every community.

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.

A job saved in one industry can too easily be a job lost in another.

Some of these races, notably those of Asia, are trained by a hundred generations to eat less, wear less, seek less shelter, and work longer hours than any Western race can endure. No Western standards can compete with them in their midst.

It’s much better than shutting down trade to help people adjust to the effects of trade.

The thing that we have to worry about is this protectionist movement that has reared its head again in this country

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.

Free trade is hard to sell politically.

Free trade is always vulnerable to democratic politics.

A vicious circle of increasing emigration resulting in a smaller domestic market depleted of initiative and skill, and a reduced incentive … to undertake and organize the productive enterprises which alone can provide increased employment opportunities and higher living standards…. Protectionism, both in agriculture and industry would have to give way to active participation in a free-trading world.

The reason that we are becoming less equal is because of the greater requirements, secure requirements, for a good job. This goes back to the '80s basically, this started changing as globalization and the IT revolution merged, and each started to drive the other.

There is more uncertainty than usual about job futures because computers are replacing more and more human intelligence, and globalization is proceeding at an accelerating pace.

I concluded that the trade agreements weren't working as promised, and was depreciating the wages and the manufacturing base, and the jobs of Americans, and that both needed to change, and Donald Trump was out there. So I went to his rally.

But now, we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated - free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.

You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.

I would say ... that moving jobs overseas is a reality of global competition, ... If you come from Pennsylvania, we've lost a lot of jobs from global competition. I think that's just a truth, if you will.

This country is facing an economy that has been radically transformed.And these changes have been disruptive. They have changed people's lives. The jobs that once sustained our middle class, they either don't pay enough or they are gone, and we need someone that understands that as our nominee.

Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized world has come upon a moment of reckoning. We've seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government and global trade deal, and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty and have destroyed many of those nations.

How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn't even exist? Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation.

The companies move labor to the lowest-cost markets. And so I don't - I used to support these agreements. In the Congress, I lost the AFL-CIO endorsement a few years because I supported them. But when middle class incomes are declining, these agreements don't work well for America.