Laurent Fabius Quotes

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

Trade helps bring us products cheaply, but there is no guarantee whatsoever to assume that it will allow us to replace the jobs that have been lost, and there is no mechanism under productivity that says that, either.

The demographic weight of countries such as China and India exercise a massive pressure on our wages and salaries. They have accomplished massive technological advances and the revolution in information technology has reduced the costs of transport.

Despite all the political sound and fury, little service-sector offshoring has happened to date. But it may eventually amount to a third Industrial Revolution, and industrial revolutions have a way of transforming societies.

If workmen become scarce, the manufacturer gives higher wages, but at first requires an encrease of labour; and this is willingly submitted to by the artisan, who can now eat and drink better, to compensate his additional toil and fatigue.

Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are lower than they were 10 years ago, if you can believe that.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

One of the great dilemmas for America will be that American companies will do very well while American workers might not.

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.

One man's wage increase is another man's price increase.

We have little of no inflation in manufacturing goods because more and more we buy products from abroad at very cheap prices.

In the matter of labor, whether common or skilled, the white artisan has no chance to compete with Orientals upon their own soil, or—except in the manufactures wholly depending upon the applied sciences—upon any other soil. White labor has never been able to compete on equal terms with Oriental labor.

Whole communities have been devastated as good-paying jobs continue to leave the U.S.

For food service industry and retail, I'm for the minimum wage being increased to at least $12. Not for manufacturing. Software and robotics are going to revolutionize manufacturing in the next 10 years. In the meantime, we have to compete with overseas manufacturing.

Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.

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.

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 global economy is a fact of life .... No politician can promise to protect you from it.

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

Plenty of people must also cause cheapness in wages, which cause cheapness in manufacture.

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.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

Fundamentally, where you have an industry in which labor is the primary cost, we can’t compete and probably shouldn’t.

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

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.