Labor Competition Quotes

NAFTA, supported by the Secretary cost, us 800,000 jobs nationwide, tens of thousands of jobs in the Midwest. Permanent normal trade relations with China cost us millions of jobs. Look, I was on a picket line in early 1990's against NFATA because you didn't need a PhD in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour.

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

The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.

The population feels the physical pressure of the foreigners coming and working here, some [of whom] are prepared to work longer hours or accept less.

The condition of white people in this State is such that they must labor in competition with the negro laborer.

Is it not rather our duty to make labor more respectable by preventing all black competition, especially in the territories…. Negro equality will be abundant, as every white laborer will have occasion to regret when he is elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave niggers.

In the matter of labor, whether common or skilled, the white artisan has no chance to compete with Orientals upon their own soil, or—except in the manufactures wholly depending upon the applied sciences—upon any other soil. White labor has never been able to compete on equal terms with Oriental labor.

You are never going to have, in a country as rich as ours [the USA], that borders a country as poor as Mexico, an end to immigration. You just won't. The question is, if you make it humane and if you make it regulated. It's much better for an American worker to compete against a regulated immigrant inside labor standards, than it is to ever to compete against an illegal immigrant.

While the American can out-work the alien, the alien can so far under-live the American as to force him out of all competitive labor.

There is nothing to be said in favor of the immigration of Japanese laborers into the United States. If unrestricted, it would wipe out American standards of living, eventually reduce us to the economic level of the Oriental, and implant an alien and half-breed race on our soil which might make the negro problem look white.

If we get a tax system that is competitive, we will hire people. When you hire people, you have to compete for labor. When you compete for labor, you drive wages.

Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.

Yet in this global economy, no jobs are safe. High-speed Internet connections and low-cost, skilled labor overseas are an explosive combination.

Laborers have every disposition to work above the slave, and if there were opportunity would be glad to do so, but without such opportunity they come into competition with him… Already there is disposition to exclude him [the slave] from the trades, from public works, from drays [land transportation of goods], and the tables of hotels; he is even now excluded to a great extent. And when more laborers shall come in greater numbers to the South, they will still more increase the tendency to exclusion; they will question the right of masters to employ their slaves in any works that they may wish for; they will invoke the aid of legislation; they will use the elective franchise to that end; they may acquire the power to determine municipal elections; they will inexorably use it; and thus the town of Charleston, at the very heart of slavery, may become a fortress of democratic power against it.

Workers, black and white, need some kind of international affirmative action to protect them from unfair competition with unorganized or slave labor abroad and unfair competition with robots at home.