Cheap Labor Quotes

Cheap labor is not going to be the way we compete in the United States. It's going to be brain power. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Business often does a good job supporting communities: the arts, universities, and scientific enterprises ... But that philosophy has rarely reached poor countries. Even businesses that are enlightened in their home bases see Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia as places to exploit natural resources or use cheap labor. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

Whatever Latin America sells - raw materials or manufactures - its chief export product is really cheap labor. ~ Eduardo Galeano

We have military bases all over the world, and that's purely to protect our portfolio abroad.Our investments, and our production, our exploitation of cheap labor and raw materials. We're on the scene to do that, and the military is there to see that it happens. ~ Philip Berrigan

Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you're unsually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and the kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the rent. ~ Tom Perrotta

Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, bosses in search of cheap labor moved plants overseas or to Sunbelt communities, where unions were weaker or didn't exist. Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee's manufacturing sector lost more jobs than during the Great Depression - about 56,000 of them. The city where virtually everyone had a job in the postwar years saw its unemployment rate climb into the double digits. Those who found new work in the emerging service industry took a pay cut. As one historian observed, 'Machinists in the old Allis-Chalmers plant earned at least $11.60 an hour; clerks in the shopping center that replaced much of that plant in 1987 earned $5.23. ~ Matthew Desmond

It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits. The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force. ~ Walter Brueggemann

Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor. ~ Germaine Greer

The church must reckon with the reality that ever since black people were stolen from Africa and trafficked to this land, they have been dehumanized, abused, criminalized, incarcerated, exploited for profit, and governed in distinctively sinister ways. This oppression has been personal, institutional, systemic, and legislative. It has been authorized and sanctioned by our local, state, and federal government. As the church, do we have the wherewithal to confront the austere reality that our national economy has been subsidized by a criminal justice system that is, and has been, predicated on the exploitation of cheap labor extracted from poor, racially profiled people of color? ~ Dominique DuBois Gilliard

Global poverty is an input on the supply side; the global economic system feeds on cheap labor. ~ Michel Chossudovsky

Corporations can't have it both ways. They can't tell Americans how much they want us to buy their products, but then run abroad to avoid taxes or hire cheap labor. American corporations should pay their fair share of taxes and create decent-paying jobs here - not in China. ~ Bernie Sanders

Well, I think we are seeing some shifts in manufacturing. China, when you go in and you talk to the big manufacturers there, the biggest problems in mainland China are recruiting and retention. There isn't an endless supply of cheap labor anymore in China. And it's now true that the labor rates in Mexico are lower than in China. ~ Rodney Brooks

My parents were immigrants. And the place for all immigrants was the factories. They were the source of cheap labor. ~ Jack Kirby

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. ~ Angela Davis

We're giving jobs to people who would otherwise be out of work if we weren't exploiting cheap labor. ~ Lily Tomlin

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. ~ Jessica Bruder

Crocker, it's about property values."
"It's about being in place. We -" gesturing around the Visitor's Bar and its withdrawal into seemingly unbounded shadow, "we're in place. We've been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor - all of that's ours. And you, at the end of the day, what are you? one more unit in this swarm of transients who come and go without pause here in the sunny Southland, eager to be bought off with a car of a certain make, model, and year, a blonde in a bikini, thirty seconds on some excuse for a wave - a chili dog, for Christ's sake." He shrugged. "We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible. ~ Thomas Pynchon

As Americans, we have the right to decide who lives within our borders, and we can't let unscrupulous employers to undercut honest business owners by exploiting cheap labor. ~ Hank Johnson

I'm like Casanova meets Henry Ford. My reproduction methods are more like production methods one might see in a factory, complete with conveyer belts, mechanical assistance, and cheap labor. ~ Jarod Kintz

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich. ~ Michael Moore

The Republican Party looks at massive immigration, legal and illegal, as a source of cheap labor, satisfying a very important constituency. ~ Tom Tancredo

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Slavery provides comfort to the oppressor. Even more than comfort, it provides power over those who witness. Slavery is, after all, a luxury. Slavery is a distraction, so long as the onlooker is not the victim. Slavery is cheap labor, an outlet for aggression, and, so we've learned over the years, a meaningless object to fulfill sexual desires. ~ D'Andre Lampkin

She (a woman politician) will be challenging a system that is still wedded to militarism and that saves billions of dollars a year by underpaying women and using them as a reserve cheap labor supply ~ Bella Abzug

Is anyone in the U.S. innocent? Although those at the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid gain the most, millions of us depend - either directly or indirectly - on the exploitation of the LDCs for our livelihoods. The resources and cheap labor that feed nearly all our businesses come from places like Indonesia, and very little ever makes its way back. The loans of foreign aid ensure that today's children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back. The fact that our own companies already received most of this money to build the power plants, airports, and industrial parks does not factor into this formula. Does the excuse that most Americans are unaware of this constitute innocence? Uninformed and intentionally misinformed, yes - but innocent? ~ John Perkins

You're a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery. ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That's why they don't pay you for it. ~ Joanna Russ

More pervasive and corrosive are the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time - education, nursing, or art performance - constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient. ~ Marcia Bjornerud

Love labor: for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayest for physic. It is wholesome for thy body and good for thy mind. ~ William Penn

All but a prophetic few must go about God's work in very quiet, very unspectacular ways. And as you labor to know Him, and to know that He knows you; as you invest your time
and your convenience
in quiet, unassuming service, you will indeed find that "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up" (Matthew 4:6). ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

No labor is really menial unless you're not getting adequate wages. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers. ~ Oswald Mosley

Education reform doesn't come cheap. But the price of ignorance is far, far greater ~ Rania Al-Abdullah

Abbey, with a cheap beer nestled in his hand, says simply, "Desolation in my heart. ~ Sean Prentiss

The hype cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration. ~ Criss Jami

Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

Labor looks different in the 21st century. And so should our job training programs. ~ Leila Janah

But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed. ~ Winifred Holtby

They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out. ~ Gunter Grass

All the things that most people hate about traveling
the recycled air, the artificial lighting, the digital juice dispensers, the cheap sushi
are warm reminders that I'm home. ~ Ryan Bingham

Before this grief, mountains must bend down
And rivers stop,
But prison locks are strong,
And behind them are the labor-camp bunks
And the deadly tedium.
For others the fresh breeze is blowing,
For others the extravagant sun sets -
For us everything is the same, we know nothing,
We hear only the keys and their hateful grinding.
Only the soldiers' stiff steps.
We get up as for early Mass in the city,
The savaged city, and coming
We meet ourselves, the dead, the unbreathing.
The sun is low, the Neva misty,
It is only in the distance that hope is singing.
The sentence . . . and at once tears,
Now everything has been taken,
The rest of life, torn from her heart,
Knocked backwards by a hoodlum
And yet she walks . . . stumbles . . . alone . . .
Where are they now, unwilling friends
Of years in Hell?
What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms?
What hallucinations in the circle of the moon?
I send them this goodbye and wish them well. ~ Anna Akhmatova

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. ~ Walt Whitman

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution. ~ Samuel Johnson

A quote has an even more powerful effect if we presume not just a particular author behind it, but God, nature, the unconscious, labor, or difference. These are strong fetishes, each conjuring the powerful submedial in a particular way. Yet all of them must nonetheless be exchanged in a certain rhythm according to the laws of the medial economy. In order to create such fetishes, one does not have to use brilliant quotes by famous authors but can use anonymous quotes that stem from the author- less realm of the everyday, lowly, foreign, vulgar, aggressive, or stupid. Precisely such quotes produce the effect of medial sincerity, that is, the revelation of a deeply submerged, hidden, medial plane on the familiar medial surface. It then appears as if this surface had been blasted open from the inside and that the respective quotes had sprung forth from the submedial interior - like aliens. All of this, of course, refers to the economy of the quote as a gift that can be offered, accepted, and reciprocated. ~ Boris Groys

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Human labor, in general, is still divided into two exclusive categories: the first - solely intellectual and managerial - includes the scientists, artists, engineers, inventors, accountants, educators, governmental officials, and their subordinate elites who enforce labor discipline The second group consists of the great mass of workers, people prevented from applying creative ideas or intelligence, who blindly and mechanically carry out the orders of the intellectual-managerial elite This economic and social division of labor has disastrous consequences for members of the privileged classes, the masses of the people, and for the prosperity, as well as the moral and intellectual development, of society as a whole. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

It is hard to understand why work should be called a curse - until one remembers what bitterness forced or uncongenial labour is. But the work for which we are fitted - which we feel we are sent into the world to do - what a blessing it is and what fullness of joy it holds. ~ L.M. Montgomery

I like that there's very little mystery in how the artwork is actually made. It's the labor and the focus and the precision that drives it to the next level. ~ Jacob Hashimoto

On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years, say, or every thousand. The old shell I called myself cracked and was swallowed by a sudden crevasse, and just as suddenly was lost in the commotion. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance.

Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social ~ Torben Iversen

[Science is] the labor and handicraft of the mind. ~ Francis Bacon

Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing. ~ Thorstein Veblen

The Capitalist Class knows that what brings on the increased supply is not immigration so much, but the improved and ever improving machinery, held as private property. For every immigrant by whom the labor market is overstocked, it is overstocked by ten workingmen in the country whom privately owned machinery displaces. The Capitalist Class is full well aware that if this fact be known the conclusion would leap to sight ; to wit, that the solution oi" the Labor Problem is simply the public ownership of the machine. If fifty men, working ten hours a day, can, with improved machinery, produce as much as one hundred did before without such improved machinery, the publicly owned machine would not, as the privately owned machine does, throw out fifty men; it would throw out five of the former ten hours of work. It is clear as day to the Capitalist Class that it must raise dust over this fact so as to conceal it; and no better means to this end is offered than the fomenting of the plausible delusion that the evil lies in immigration. Anti-immigration laws are the fruit of these two purpose. Such laws kill two flies with one slap ; they draw attention away from the nerve that aches, and simultaneously they help to set the workers of the land in racial and creed hostility against the newcomers, who, of course, the Capitalist Class itself sees to shall not be lacking. Obviously, it is in the interest of the Working Class that this brace of fatal delusions be dispelled from their mind ~ Danie DeLeon

An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn. ~ Lewis Hyde

I am thinking about launching a wine website where there is a deal and the crowd can dictate how cheap it can get. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed. ~ Isabel Allende

I see it routinely when I get asked to speak at conferences. I'm supposed to come cheap because, after all, I'm just a farmer. If you're smart and capable, you become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer technician --- anything white collar. For goodness' sake, don't wear a blue collar. That makes your mother and me a failure and our friends will wonder about our family. ~ Joel Salatin

The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder. ~ T. S. Eliot

The real essence of work is concentrated energy. ~ Walter Bagehot

Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. In my business of motion pictures and television entertainment, many minds and skillful hands must collaborate ... T he work seeks to comprehend the spiritual and material needs and yearnings of gregarious humanity. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. ~ Walt Disney

Life is a labor pain; we are here to give birth to ourself. ~ Bernie Siegel

The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last. ~ Sufjan Stevens