Labor Displacement Quotes

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

The H-1B program was never intended to create a pool of foreign labor that displaces Americans' opportunities for good-paying jobs.

The United States and Arizona are both losing jobs to offshore locations.

The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.

Transformation in the nature of work tend to brings wrenching social changes in their wake.

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

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though]; when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.

The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment.

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

Technocracy wants to do everything by machinery. Machinery is doing just fine. If it can't kill you, it will put you out of work.

Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

Our education system has succeeded so far in teaching generations to do different routine tasks. So when tractors displaced farming labor, we taught the next generation to work in factories. But what we've never really been good at is teaching a huge number of people to do non-routine creative work.

Skilled workers historically have been ambivalent toward automation, knowing that the bodies it would augment or replace were theoccasion for both their pain and their power.

The spinning wheel is not meant to oust a single man or woman from his or her occupation.

Machines taking over jobs - it's the history of civilization. Replacing farm animals, old forms of manual labor, now taking over small, menial aspects of cognition. But there's still plenty of room for creativity, for curiosity - many things that are related to passion, like art. But also, things about human communication and challenges, massive challenges that we left behind because we didn't want to take so much risk, such as space exploration, deep ocean exploration.

Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and by precisely so much you increase the demand for and wages of white labor.