James Fallows Quotes

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.

History is full of examples of poorer nations that become wealthy by exploiting their comparative advantage in cheap labor to become globally competitive in a range of manufacturing industries.... If robots are expected to take over many of the menial jobs currently performed by people, the concern should not be for the working class in wealthy countries but for the billions living in the developing world who will now have lost the only established ladder out of poverty.

There are practices which most people believe should be ended. They include … the shifting of actual production form one locality or region to another in pursuit of the cheapest wage scale.

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

You're not going to bring back all the jobs from China.

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

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business. Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country's future. We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment.

You cannot buy an American telephone, TV set or VCR. This is a part of America that has gone abroad and will never come back again.

Protect and foster American industries … Democrats are willing to risk our manufacturing interests in the face of the starving hordes of pauper labor in other countries.

Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing capacity.

Benedict Arnold CEOs send American jobs overseas.

The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper.

Big Business wants cheap labor costs.

There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.

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.

Free trade would place our farmers and workers in competition with peasant and sweated labor products.

Offshoring is only the latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about at least since Adam Smith… More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that’s a good thing.

International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood.

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.

Free trade will bring widespread discontent. It will revolutionize values. It will take away more than one half the earning capacity of brain and brawn.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

I am always astonished that conservatives want to save money by paying workers less—driving down the wages of working people.