Labor Market Dynamics Quotes

Labor is one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

This country has been economically successful because of cheap energy and cheap labor and we are never going to have these again.

The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.

You can keep raising it, but at some point, everybody who believes in a minimum wage will say, "No, wait a minute. That's too much," and at that point, you have demonstrated that that there's no market relationship. You're just talking emotion. You're just talking "fairness." You're just talking being nice, and that's not how the market works. People aren't paid a wage because they're being nice to, or because it's fair. In the market, the market rules.

It takes about two and a half percent growth just to keep unemployment stable.

Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way - both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.

The pace of increases in labor compensation provides another possible indicator, albeit an imperfect one, of the degree of labor market slack.

The embourgeoisement of China's proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but 'inevitable' isn't the same as 'speedy.'

As a believer in the free market, the sooner you have people with a job - the better chance they have a job, the sooner they are employed - the sooner they become consumers. And the sooner they become consumers, the sooner they become deciders about their own health care decisions.

The striking thing about America is - it's historically, extraordinary unusual, I don't of any other instance - is that productivity of workers and wages have not moved in tandem.

In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee's lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price.

Blue collar workers cannot hire each other. White collar workers cannot hire each other. You have to have a businessman or a businesswomen, a business owner to hire you. And you cannot make the environment so unfriendly to them or so unprofitable or so burdensome that they go out of business,because if they go out of business, you are out of a job.

We're giving jobs to people who would otherwise be out of work if we weren't exploiting cheap labor.

It shouldn't be easier for a company to get a tax break on buying another robot than training their employees to gain new skills for the modern economy.

As long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

I don’t buy the argument that there are certain jobs that American just will not do.

The problem right now is jobs. The problem right now is the economy and economic growth.

You cannot set salaries by decree. At the end of the day, it doesn't work with the market. What you can make sure to do is to train workers in order to make them more efficient and demand higher salaries because of their qualifications.

I would say ... that moving jobs overseas is a reality of global competition, ... If you come from Pennsylvania, we've lost a lot of jobs from global competition. I think that's just a truth, if you will.

A job saved in one industry can too easily be a job lost in another.

One of the major forces driving the decline in wages and the concentration of wealth at the top is the offshoring of American jobs overseas - reducing wages not only in manufacturing but also across the economy.

The best customer of American industry is the well paid worker.

A basic assumption shapes most Americans’ mindset about labor: the belief that the death of unions isn’t my problem because I’m not in a union. That assumption is wrong. Even if you aren’t a member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.

There are genuine questions to be asked about why we now have the highest level of employment in many decades, contrary to the position during the boom-bust years of the Conservatives.

To put it simply and a bit crudely: Our economy is demanding more well-educated workers than our schools are providing. To attract this scarce resource, communities have to offer more than just jobs.