Labor Market Regulation Quotes

We will open a new bunch of reforms regarding the labor market to make it simpler and adaptable, more flexible.

Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

Until the early 20th century, significant economic hardship was so woven into human history and experience that it wasn’t yet seen as an aberration. Only the combination of a severe crisis and the belief that such crises not only could but should be prevented by collective government action led to the creation of unemployment statistics.

The biggest problem in Italy is work. And out-of-control immigration damages the labor market because Italians can't compete with illegal workers who are being exploited. So to restore dignity to work, we must control immigration.

A minimum-wage law, a law that prevents employers and employees from entering into mutually beneficial economic exchanges, is as far from a free market or free enterprise as one can get. That's why it causes so much damage and destruction, especially to black teenagers and others whose labor, for one reason or another, is valued by employers at less than the government-established minimum wage.

Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combatting the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are mode.

A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.

I feel no doubt whatever that the parish laws of England have contributed to raise the price of provisions and to lower the real price of labour.

Employment no longer responds to governments …