Quotes About Labor

The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.

I believe in workers' rights when people are doing a good job.

I like dirty boys. Mechanics, construction workers, artists who get paint and clay everywhere. They gotta have rough hands.

If cheap immigrant labor is made unavailable, employers can hire Americans at a higher wage, or replace low-wage immigrant workers with technology and automation, which will create a smaller number of skilled jobs for Americans.

I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

The right to organize is a fundamental right for American workers.

As I see it, if the production of a factory is expanding, and workers are satisfied, it's OK for there to be a disparity. The best paid should be about three times more than the worst paid.

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

In any given month, a large number of workers are being hired or are leaving their current jobs, illustrating the dynamism of the U.S. labor market.

The thing that the Internet does is it allows labor to move freely across borders in the way that capital does but, traditionally, labor cannot. So the Internet frees workers to be based anywhere and work for employers anywhere.

We know that freedom has many dimensions. It is the right of the man who tills the land to own the land; the right of the workers to join together to seek better conditions of labor; the right of businessmen to use ingenuity and foresight to produce and distribute without arbitrary interference in a truly competitive economy.

Workers are baking the pie of prosperity, but they're not sharing in those dividends. That's unfair.

Workers' rights are under attack across the country.

The difference between the Chinese workers and foreign workers lies in the fact that the latter are oppressed only by their own capitalists and not by those of other countries.

When I visit businesses across New Hampshire, they tell me that their No. 1 need is even more highly skilled workers to fill job openings.

We want to make sure that workers know their rights and that employers know their obligations. That is the best way to protect workers.

It is Trump who plays with the tax code to pay no taxes; it is Trump whose Trump-brand products are made overseas by cheap labor; it is Trump who hires undocumented workers from Poland to work on his projects, then refuses to pay them minimum wages.

In a globalized economy, jobs no longer need a passport, but workers do.

If the U.S. doubled its total immigration and prioritized bringing in new workers, it could add more than half a percentage point a year to expected GDP growth.

We shouldn't bring in foreign workers to do jobs that belong to U.S. citizens.

American workers have faced serious difficulties in the labor market since the first oil shock in 1973. Since that time, the pace of productivity advance has slowed for reasons which are still not understood, lowering the rate at which living standards have advanced.

Private sector labor market flows provide additional indications of the strength of the labor market. For example, the quits rate has tended to be pro-cyclical, since more workers voluntarily quit their jobs when they are more confident about their ability to find new ones and when firms are competing more actively for new hires.

Very few undocumented workers come here to be unemployed.

Historians have often censored civil rights activists' commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers' rights are two sides of the same coin.