Worker Displacement Quotes

We do not need an immigration policy that displaces American workers or American students and drives up costs in education.

Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan.

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.

We have seen numerous instances in which American businesses have brought in foreign skilled workers after having laid off skilled American workers, simply because they can get the foreign workers more cheaply. It has become a major means of circumventing the costs of paying skilled American workers or the costs of training them.

The most powerful recent innovation in government is when states aggressively use community colleges for retraining. In Michigan, where large numbers of workers were displaced from the manufacturing industry, we created a wildly successful program: No Worker Left Behind.

Uncontrolled, mass immigration displaces British workers, forces people onto benefits, and suppresses wages for the low-paid.

Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy, from engineering to health care workers, forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.

And a revolution of automation finds machines replacing men in the mines and mills of America, without replacing their incomes or their training or their needs to pay the family doctor, grocer and landlord.

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

Policy and business elites did not speak frankly about the unequal distribution of benefits from trade and failed to adequately accompany market-opening with good domestic policies to equip displaced workers to upskill, adjust, and share in the new opportunities being created.

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

Look, we have a very lousy system for retraining workers that get disrupted. And, you know, I just don't see anybody that's particularly interested in fixing that. They think it's fixed, but it's not fixed. So, we need a dramatic improvement in the way we train people who get displaced.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing.

The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.

Apparently, union bosses are so distraught about declining enrollments they will stoop to exploiting illegal workers. There is no doubt that this would hurt American workers, who would suddenly face a flooded job market full of cheap foreign labor. It would depress the wages of the American workers and cost them jobs.

The factory work that lifted millions out of poverty in places like China and Vietnam probably did cost some workers in North Carolina and Wallonia their jobs.

The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO's, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate... whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.

As more workers lose manufacturing jobs as companies cut back, some are being forced into lower-paying retail jobs. But they still have union cards in their wallets.

The data on worker displacement after NAFTA reads like a funeral program for the middle class.

Whenever I write about immigration, I hear heart-wrenching stories of computer workers who are unemployed and facing severe hardship.

What really is happening, is the word is now out, that when you want to move your plant to Mexico or some other place, and you want to fire all of your workers from Michigan and Ohio and all these places that I won, for good reason, it's not going to happen that way anymore.