National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, we continue to make progress on the Defense authorization bill. Hopefully somewhere in the Halls of Congress, we are also making progress on the FAA authorization bill and, maybe before the end of the year, getting that to a final resolve.

I know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are working very hard, but I had to come to the Senate floor at this moment to say that Christmas came early in the Northwest today when a major deal between the Boeing Company and aerospace workers, machinists, resolved what had been a conflict in the past on how to work together.

A new relationship of working together on incentives and efficiency and performance has resulted in the Boeing Company making a decision to build the next-generation 737 MAX plane in the Pacific Northwest. That is great news for aerospace workers in Puget Sound. It means there is going to be a skill set for building fuel-efficient planes for many years to come. But it is a great testament to both the company and the workers who--a year ago you probably heard more about the NLRB issue, and now what you are hearing about is an agreement on a multiyear contract that is going to get these workers jobs in building planes with the next-generation technology.

This is very big and important news not just for the Pacific Northwest but for the country because it means we can come together to resolve differences. I would hope the Senate might apply some of the same things because the dispute as to where these two organizations were about how to proceed to the future obviously had a lot of discussion, even here on the Senate floor, and yet now today we see them coming together in a huge milestone agreement that means more planes are going to be built, in an agreement where workers and the company are working together to improve performance and deliver these planes, which many people want because they are so fuel-efficient, on time.

So for the Northwest to have this kind of boost, this shot in the arm, at this point in time is really important. I expect that as this agreement and the agreement details are seen by many people, they will see this really is a way forward for the Northwest to continue to be at the top of the aerospace game. That is important because the United States needs to be at the top of the aerospace game. We are facing tough competition from many countries such as China and Europe and others that are trying to lure the manufacturing base away from the United States.

What we see in the Northwest is that not only do you have a company such as Boeing, but you have a chain of many suppliers that are also working to make aerospace manufacturing in the United States one of the key industries in which the United States is world premier.

So I say congratulations to both the company and to the machinists and to Machinists International for their hard work on inking this deal. I hope it will bring much benefit and economic growth not just to Puget Sound--certainly to there--but to the rest of the country as well.

I yield the floor.

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