Richard Trumka Quotes

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

I think the most important issue for all of us is our economy and jobs and creating opportunities for young people to be able to get the education that you need to be able to afford to go to college.

Jobs are critically important, but looking at economic change through the impact on jobs has always been a difficult way to think about economic progress.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.

To live well in the second half of the 1990s and into the 21st Century, Australians have to produce and trade better than we have in the past….to improve workers' living standards and generate more jobs, we need to make major changes in the way our companies are managed and our factories produce wealth

For most of history, the prime source of human insecurity was nature. Capitalist societies have been oriented toward innovation and dynamism, to the creation of new knowledge, new products, and new modes of production and distribution. All this has shifted the locus of insecurity from nature to the economy.

Apart from finding a first job, college graduates seem to adapt more easily than those with only a high school degree as the economy evolves and labor-market needs change.

Millions of young Americans have graduated from college during the Obama presidency, ready to use their gifts and get moving in life. Half of them can't find the work they studied for, or any work at all. So here's the question: Without a change in leadership, why would the next four years be any different from the last four years?

I'm hoping they slow down a little bit with technology, because I'm just trying to keep up.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

People's behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can't type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.

I've met graduating college kids facing loan payments and a bad economy, and they are worried that they won't be able to get a job. This is not the way America needs to be.

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook - each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

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.

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.

Driven by globalization and technology our country and our economy is becoming different every day.

The American economy cannot be considered healthy when most of its workers and consumers are not.

The minute your membership looses a job that can be identified, economic theory goes out the window. You're dealing with frightened human beings.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

History shows us that the youth are usually a step ahead of their elders when change is required.

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.

The labor union in enforcing a high scale of wages brings about the distribution of wealth throughout the entire community.

Power? Nine workers out of ten still unorganized, and union dues going to bribe middle class politicians. You call that power?

It’s hard for the young to live in uncertainty…. Our founders lived in great uncertainty.

The economic development of industrial society tends inevitably to the ruin of small industries.