Labor Market Shifts Quotes

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

Trade is not the cause for unemployment. In fact, the biggest drivers for unemployment are innovation and increased productivity. It has nothing to do with trade.

When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.

There is more uncertainty than usual about job futures because computers are replacing more and more human intelligence, and globalization is proceeding at an accelerating pace.

As the world transforms, moves closer together, jobs are displaced, and the world of work completely changes the way we live, the way we think. As that revolution goes on around us, it is going to pose political challenges of which immigration is one very obvious one, which are going to be extremely difficult to deal with. But it's like free trade. You know, in the end, if we go protectionist, we'll make a mistake.

A job saved in one industry can too easily be a job lost in another.

Productivity growth, however it occurs, has a disruptive side to it. In the short term, most things that contribute to productivity growth are very painful.

One can understand the politics of that at this moment. It's an effort to buy time for a constituency of workers who have really been suffering in the last 20 years, and who need to be prepared and be given time to prepare for a transition to a very different type of employment that we may moving on to in the coming decades.

Our jobs are fleeing the country. They're going to Mexico. They're going to many other countries. You look at what China is doing to America in terms of making our product.

Since 2000, we have lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, of which 500,000 jobs were in high-tech industries such as telecommunications and electronics.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor.

The companies move labor to the lowest-cost markets. And so I don't - I used to support these agreements. In the Congress, I lost the AFL-CIO endorsement a few years because I supported them. But when middle class incomes are declining, these agreements don't work well for America.

We always see shifts in employment. If you think about it, if you go back to 1800, it took 80 percent of the labor force to produce enough food for the country. Now it takes less than 3 percent. Well, the truth is that market systems move people around.