American Businesses
Floor Speech
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, over the last several months, I put my staff on a little mission. I asked them to identify manufacturing companies in my home State of Illinois that have not only weathered this recession but are doing well and are hiring. I wanted to meet with these companies and find out why the recession has treated them differently, particularly when it comes to manufacturing jobs. I have been pleasantly surprised at how many businesses I have found to be in that condition in my State. Not to understate our unemployment rate or the impact of the recession on many businesses, the fact is there are some that have not only weathered the storm but are doing quite well, and they represent a variety of different goods that they manufacture.
The heartening and encouraging news is that we are hearing more often that companies have decided to resource their jobs back to the United States. In his State of the Union Address, the President spoke of one such company, Master Lock, located in Milwaukee, WI, which he noted has now announced that they think America is the best place to make products and do business. That is a good trend we want to encourage.
We know we have lost a goodly share of manufacturing jobs over the last several years. In the year 2000, more than 17 million Americans were employed in manufacturing. Ten years later, the number had fallen to 11.5 million--from 17 million to 11.5 million. More than 300 of those jobs were lost in my home State of Illinois in that decade, from 2000 to 2010.
But American manufacturing is growing again. One of the real good news stories is Chrysler. I am sure the Presiding Officer remembers the controversy when General Motors and Chrysler faced bankruptcy and the possibility of literally going out of business. In my lifetime, other car manufacturers have gone out of business. The President decided--and rightly so--that we could not afford to lose those jobs. So we engineered a loan with General Motors and Chrysler, premised on their changing the way they did business.
Many critics said that was the wrong thing to do, the capitalist purists who were saying: No, no, these things happen. Companies go away, and new companies emerge; General Motors and Chrysler should be allowed to go gently into the night.
President Obama disagreed. Many of us disagreed. And he put a downpayment on the future of the American automobile industry which has paid off handsomely. Just this last week, the major auto manufacturers--Ford, Chrysler--announced recordbreaking profits. They have restructured. They are selling a better product, they are doing it in a better way, and they are now competitive. The American people are buying their products. General Motors has come back strong.
Just by way of comparison, I recently read that if you look at the total number of employees in certain companies, it gives you an idea of why some have more value overall to the economy than others. We all know Facebook. We hear about it all the time. When somebody asks to take my picture, I laughingly say: Do you promise you will put it on Facebook? And they laugh out loud because that is exactly what they are going to do, instantaneously. Facebook has about 3,000 employees in America. We all know Google. We use it every day--I do--to find information and to access different sites. Google has about 30,000 employees in the United States. How many employees are there in General Motors' direct employment? A hundred thousand.
When the President said that we need to invest in the automobile industry, it was a decision based on the need for good-paying jobs right here in America. Well, I can tell you, when it comes to Chrysler, it was an investment that paid off for my home State of Illinois. This week, Chrysler is announcing that it will be adding 1,600 manufacturing jobs at its plant in Belvidere, IL. I was encouraged when I met with the CEO of Chrysler and he said it is one of the most efficient and cost-productive plants in all of Chrysler Corporation, and it should be expanded.
In November, Caterpillar, the largest exporter in my State, the largest manufacturer, announced a $600 million investment in its plants in Decatur and Peoria, IL, and they are going to bring back hundreds of jobs to our area.
American companies are beginning to realize that manufacturing products right here in the United States can be profitable again. That is good news for Illinois and good news for America. Manufacturing was the backbone of the American economy for decades. We may never see it return to its heyday, but we should take steps to strengthen it.
In the State of the Union Address, President Obama laid out a number of key steps to boost manufacturing and ensure that more products have these three key words: ``Made in America.''
The President's proposal builds on legislation that I introduced personally in 2010 to reduce the tax benefits that companies can claim when they close factories here in the United States. Hard as it may be to believe, the Tax Code rewards and compensates those companies that decide to close down manufacturing in the United States and move it overseas. The Tax Code currently allows companies moving operations overseas to the deduct their moving expenses and reduce their taxes in the United States as a result. It is a direct subsidy to move a job overseas. It is just common sense that taxpayers should not be helping companies cover the cost of outsourcing jobs.
The President is also taking important steps to encourage insourcing--when companies close operations overseas and move jobs back to the United States. Specifically, the President is calling for a 20-percent income tax credit for the expenses of moving operations back into the United States to help companies bring jobs home.
He also proposed a new credit for investments that help finance projects in communities that have suffered a major job loss event, and every one of our States has one. It might be the steel mill in Hennepin, IL, the tool manufacturers in Sterling-Rock Falls, the appliance factory in Galesburg, or the farm equipment factory in Canton, IL. Too many communities have suffered dramatic layoffs when plants have shut down over the last several decades. We have all seen the stories. We have all met the people who have seen their lives changed dramatically because of those decisions. Without new investment, many of these communities will continue to struggle.
The tide is starting to turn for American manufacturing, but we can do more to make growth in that sector stronger and faster. We may never return to the forties and fifties, but there are some things we can do. One of the things I found interesting as I visited these plants that were trying to hire people in manufacturing was the obstacles they were running into.
We have a State with a lot of unemployment, over 8 percent. In some parts of the State, it is over 10 percent. You wonder how in the world with so many people out of work there would be good-paying jobs unfilled. It turns out, I found, as I traveled around the State, those in manufacturing who want to hire new employees run into three obstacles.
The first obstacle is that people applying for a job don't have the skills necessary to work in manufacturing today. Those who have not seen it personally may not know what manufacturing looks like today. It is much different than the image of 30, 40 years ago. The plants themselves are much cleaner operations, and most of them are computer driven. Unlike the old days of steam and dirt in every direction, those aren't the manufacturing plants of today, in many instances, across America.
What they are looking for in applicants for industrial maintenance, for example, which is a major area of need as baby boomers age out and retire--industrial maintenance requires that the applicant have more than a passing knowledge of mathematics and computers. If they don't, frankly, they are walking into an environment where they cannot be of much help.
In some areas--in Danville, for example--a local manufacturer is teaming up with the Danville Community College to take those who don't possess the right math and computer skills and train them at the expense of the company so they can go to work. The same is true in my State over and over again. The community college links up with the manufacturing concern and starts training employees so they will be ready to fill the jobs, at the expense of the company.
The second obstacle is a psychological one which I hadn't thought about. It turns out that many parents, when the son says they are hiring at such-and-such a business, will say: Wait a minute. I didn't want you to grow up working in a factory like your dad. I wanted you to have a job where you wear a coat and tie. Didn't you go to community college? You ought to do better than that. It turns out there is a prejudice against working in factories, even though, as I said, they are much different and the compensation is much better than some other alternatives. They are having open houses at many factories in Illinois so families and high school counselors can see what they look like and see that they are not the image they might have in their mind.
The third obstacle is one that is very practical. Before an employer would put an employee in charge of a multimillion-dollar, computer-driven manufacturing process, they would want to make sure the employee is not only skilled but sober. That means drug tests. Many of these would-be applicants for manufacturing jobs fail drug tests time and again. Why? They have grown up in a generation that says marijuana doesn't count, and they are wrong. Or they are engaged in other drugs. They just cannot expect to be taken seriously as a job applicant if they cannot pass a drug test. They will not get through the front door.
Those three things--basic skill and training, attitudes of families toward jobs in manufacturing, and the drug tests--have turned out to be the three obstacles that have been raised time and again all across Illinois. But we can overcome each one of them, and we should. We can fill these jobs, good American jobs, with skilled set people who can produce for this country for many years to come.
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