James Surowiecki Quotes

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.

During the boom years of the 1990s, globalization emerged as the most significant development in our national life. With NAFTA and the Internet and big-box stores selling cheap goods from China, the line between national and international began to blur.

Big Business wants cheap labor costs.

An increase in the relative price of products from the low wage manufacturers in Asia and Latin America will also make those products less attractive to American consumers.

Washburn's an old American name, but this one was assembled overseas.

America is becoming more and more dependent upon imports from foreign manufacturers than we are exports from our country in all fields: in appliances, in clothing, even food. This year America may become for the first time in its history a net food importer.

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 are in a global competitive world. And in the future it will be even more, and more, and more global.

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.

Global capitalism means that people are no longer confined by the decisions of national elites. These could be the local monopolies, the local powers, politicians, and so on. By making local powers compete or by bypassing them altogether, globalization gives people more freedom to decide.

The people who are banking on Oriental trade are bound to be disappointed. The United States cannot compete with foreign countries until we can manufacture products at a lower cost, which means cheaper labor

Chinese workers making $1000 a year have been helping American designers, marketers, engineers, and retailers making $1000 a week, and up, earn even more.

Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

International borders are as uninteresting to large business as the equator.

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

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

Too much of British business and industry feels similarly secure in the warm embrace of the European single market and is failing to recognise that today's great export opportunities lie in the developing world, particularly in Asia.

A lot of companies are global.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

Lesser-skilled workers suffer the entire burden of lower wages but capture only a portion of the benefits from lower-priced offshore goods.

The competitive pressure to produce, buy, and sell to our global multi-national companies is so intense that contractors in supply chains are motivated to pay low wages, intensify exploitative conditions, keep workers fearful with insecure work contracts, or simply sack workers who have formed a union to fight back.

Corporations are driving down wages and working conditions across the globe to maximize returns for their shareholders. They use their power and influence to ensure the rules align with their interests - no matter the cost.

A nation like China has become one of the biggest production fields for exporting cheap labor, which also re-questions our history and past, re-questions human desire, and the human illusions of the past.

It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.