Eric Liu Quotes

Products made in China are cheap through the exploitation of the workforce. Every time we shop, we are driving the nail further into the coffin of American manufacturing jobs.

You know, without China there is no Wal-Mart and without Wal-Mart there is no middle class and lower class prosperity in the United States.

Foxconn is hugely important, not only in China - it's the largest employer in China - Foxconn is important around the world.

Free trade is killing the labor movement.

There are practices which most people believe should be ended. They include … the shifting of actual production form one locality or region to another in pursuit of the cheapest wage scale.

Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.

The competitive pressure to produce, buy, and sell to our global multi-national companies is so intense that contractors in supply chains are motivated to pay low wages, intensify exploitative conditions, keep workers fearful with insecure work contracts, or simply sack workers who have formed a union to fight back.

I want consumers to connect the dots, to go to any store and look at the label and connect the dots between buying cheap China products, which is better for the wallet, and all the other things we lose, like jobs.

Global supply chains are founded on a Darwinian model that rewards employers who treat working people as less than human.

The American consumer is also the American worker, and if we don't do something to protect our manufacturing base here at home, it is going to be hard to buy any retail goods.

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

When 'designed in Europe' is combined with 'made in China' and when European technologies are applied to the Chinese market, there will be amazing results.

But, we have had the debate in our country now for a number of years as to whether or not free trade agreements are good for economic growth and economic opportunity in creating jobs and lifting people out of poverty.

What's going on in this country? Unions stand against those trends. We've got to somehow insulate the robust American economy from this global economy that seems to want to devour our standard of living.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

We talk about Hollywood being pro-labor, yet about 70% of our industry has been farmed out to Canada, meaning we are losing jobs like crazy. Where's organized labor asking how we can allow such a thing to happen?

America has global trade with plenty of nations that provide inexpensive labor, but it's better for us when they're in our own hemisphere, rather than sending that business halfway around the world.

Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.

Best Buy went and hired a lot of Shanghai staff, but went and westernised them. They only work eight hours a day!

To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.

When an industry matures, it means it's not advancing, and of course the jobs go overseas. That's the obligation of the multi-national corporation: to put the factory where it can make the widget as cheap as possible. Don't get angry when a corporation does that; we've all bought into this concept. We live in a capitalistic society.

It Is Not Linen You're Wearing Out But Human Creatures' Lives.

He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

I don't think we should sell out the American worker. That's why I am opposed to NAFTA.

Most American flags are made in China as you know.