Global Labor Market Quotes

Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.

Clearly, the Global Economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

Workers are not being exploited. But if their share of growth doesn't increase, this could be a potential cause of social tension worldwide.

The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization.

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.

When we, for example, see shifts of huge production lines from certain areas to other countries, people tend to ask the question, "Where's my place in this modern world?" We have this here, this tendency in our country, we have it in other countries.

Workers in different countries can easily be played off against each other.

Jobs are pouring out of America; you see what's going on with all of the companies leaving our country, going to Mexico and other places, low pay, low wages, mass instability overseas, no matter where you look. The middle east is a disaster. North Korea - we'll take care of it folks; we're going to take care of it all. I just want to let you know, I inherited a mess.

It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of the world-system's hierarchy of wage-levels.

Though people could, in principle, cross national borders to reach places where their work is more highly rewarded, they are in fact prevented from doing so. As a result, huge differences also persist in the price of labor, as you can see when you get a haircut in rural India or hire a driver or babysitter in Bolivia. You can easily buy such services at one-fiftieth the price you would pay in London, Hamburg or Manhattan.

The companies move labor to the lowest-cost markets. And so I don't - I used to support these agreements. In the Congress, I lost the AFL-CIO endorsement a few years because I supported them. But when middle class incomes are declining, these agreements don't work well for America.

It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.