Labor Market Competition Quotes

If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone - perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers' bottom lines.

It's designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity

Where you see immigration competition play out most clearly is among high school dropouts. I'd say there's clearly immigrant competition among the least-skilled workers, but natives are a shrinking share while immigrants are a growing share.

The coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof …. the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States

Many of the worst off, native-born Americans are hurt by immigration—especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U. S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-skilled Americans..

I never, ever, had a person who could come up with the name of a person who could not get a job because an illegal immigrant had stepped in front of them, because it was either a job that person didn't want to do or didn't exist.

It's tough to figure out how do we compete in Europe and North America, when obviously a living wage for us is very different than a living wage in Indonesia.

A bloated aristocracy rakes the slums of Asia to find the meanest slave on earth—the Chinese coolie—and imports him here to meet the free American in the labor market and further widen the breach between the rich and the poor, still further to degrade white labor.

While there are many illegal immigrants in America who are good people, many, many, this doesn't change the fact that most illegal immigrants are lower skilled workers with less education, who compete directly against vulnerable American workers, and that these illegal workers draw much more out from the system than they can ever possibly pay back.

The industrial competition of China would be incomparably more dangerous to Western civilization than that of any other nation, not only because of its multiformity, but also because it is a competition to which nature has set no climatic limits. Thrifty and patient and cunning as Jews, the Chinese can accommodate themselves to any climate and to any environment….. Once China has been penetrated by the forces of Western civilization, her population will begin to display new activities, and to expand in all possible directions. Chinese competition will have to be faced, probably, very much sooner than had been expected.

While there are many illegal immigrants in our country who are good people, many, many, this doesn't change the fact that most illegal immigrants are lower skilled workers with less education, who compete directly against vulnerable American workers, and that these illegal workers draw much more out from the system than they can ever possibly pay back.

Firms are not always willing to cut wages, even if there are people lined up outside the gates to work. So why don't they?