Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HARRIS. I thank my colleague from Ohio for introducing this amendment and, once again, for this dialogue on an important issue.

I will remind my colleague that, although he brings up the fact that this has been decided in the Chamber twice already in other similar circumstances, it's not really the same because, last Friday, of course, we found out that our unemployment rate is rising in the country. It's now 9.1 percent again. We only created 54,000 jobs, not the 200,000 jobs we'd hoped we would create and certainly much fewer than the 150,000 jobs we need to create in order to get back to full employment. That's how many we need to create every month.

What this amendment means, very simply, is that we are going to have to spend 10 to 20 percent more on every single project that ends up in a project labor agreement--and more projects will. If more projects wouldn't, then the advocates wouldn't care about whether we put this provision in. It clearly will result in project labor agreements, so let's review what a project labor agreement does.

First and foremost, it increases the cost 10 to 20 percent on every project. Now, Mr. Chairman, if you or I or people in my congressional district were going to contract to build something around their homes, they wouldn't put a provision in normally that says that we're only going to hire union contractors.

They will go out. They will get the bids. They will go out. They will seek to find out what the reputations of the bidders are, and then they will make the decision based purely on price and quality and value whether or not to make that deal, not whether someone is a member of a union or hires union laborers; but that's what a project labor agreement does.

So let's talk about jobs a little bit. What is our important role here in Congress? Our role in Congress is to try to get our unemployment rate up. Well, if we save 10 to 20 percent on every job, we certainly can do more construction jobs. I just met over lunch with one of the people in my district who is an electrical contractor and he's not unionized, and he asked me to come down here and he said, please, go to the floor today and ask so that those 80 percent, or 7 percent, of us who are contractors who are not unionized can get a piece of that pie so that we don't have to fire our employees.

Mr. Chairman, it's simple. If we can save 10 to 20 percent on every project, we can hire 10 to 20 percent more people to do more projects. And again, the sad fact is our unemployment rate is 9.1 percent. It's going up, not down. The number of new jobs created last month, 54,000, going down, not up. We've got to reverse that, and we've got to do it by being efficient and being smart with our dollars, and one way is to not require project labor agreements.

Finally, let me address the issue of local citizens. I want these contracts to go into the First Congressional District of Maryland; but, Mr. Chairman, I don't have a lot of union contractors in my district. There are a lot of districts that don't have a lot of union contractors. So if we want local contractors to be employed, if we want local citizens to get jobs, our local unemployment rates to go down, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest we defeat this amendment, which will frequently require that in order to qualify for a contract you have to hire out of district. You may have to go to another State. That's not good for anyone, certainly not good for the folks in the First Congressional District of Maryland.

Mr. Chairman, again, I want to thank my colleague from Ohio for bringing this issue up, but we do need to revisit this issue because we don't live in the same world we lived in one week ago. We live in a world where the talk of the double-dip recession is sincere and it's serious and our unemployment rate going up, not down; the number of jobs going down, not up. The last thing we should do is to take those hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to use them, and I will say to waste them, in some circumstances, on project labor agreements.

I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source