Michael Moore Quotes

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.

Do we want in this nation to lose the backbone of manufacturing in this country? Do we want to be a nation that doesn't want to manufacture anything?

As more workers lose manufacturing jobs as companies cut back, some are being forced into lower-paying retail jobs. But they still have union cards in their wallets.

Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

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.

… failing factories

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

When you liberalize trade, benefits go to capital and away from labor.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

While the effect of increased global trade is positive for economies as a whole, specific sectors get battered, and large swathed of unskilled workers find themselves unemployed or under employed.

Job loss is coming like a tsunami.

I have lived my whole life just outside Youngstown, Ohio. We watched the steel mills close and 50,000 jobs disappear in the late 1970s. We watched businesses move overseas throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

What is good for General Motors is not good for America if General Motors is moving production out of the United States.

The factory work that lifted millions out of poverty in places like China and Vietnam probably did cost some workers in North Carolina and Wallonia their jobs.

Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.

Ford is leaving. You see that, their small car division leaving. Thousands of jobs leaving Michigan, leaving Ohio. They're all leaving. And we can't allow it to happen anymore.As far as child care is concerned and so many other things, I think Hillary Clinton and I agree on that. We probably disagree a little bit as to numbers and amounts and what we're going to do, but perhaps we'll be talking about that later.

it seems to me absolutely scandalous to try to set wage levels which wipe out jobs. I mean these are people who are not on the dole. They want to work and if you price them out of the market, its gonna be a lot worse for them and for the economy.

Many large corporations in the last 20 years have decided that their business plan is to shut down manufacturing in Dayton and Toledo and move it to Wuhan and Shenzhen. And then they will sell products back into the United States. It’s a betrayal of this country and a betrayal of the middle class.

Globalization: We get cheaper running shoes—You lose your job!

U.S. trade policy has been a disaster for American workers.

There are a lot of regulations that are really just crushing jobs. Look at the coal miners in the Rust Belt that are getting out of work. Look at the - look at the loggers and the timber workers and the paper mills in the West Coast. Look at the ranchers or farmers in the Midwest with regulations.

Are you a Democrat because you're a union member? Then why, after eight years of Bill Clinton, does some Chinese guy in Guangdong province have your job?

Most Republicans and the business community extol the virtues of trade, depicting it as an engine of economic progress, while most Democrats and unions attack the exportation of American jobs, claiming that trade agreements are destroying our economy.

Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.

The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.