Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Madam President, I come to the floor again today to talk about good jobs and how we can work together in a responsible and bipartisan way to create high-quality and lasting middle-class jobs. All of us hear from our home States about how they want us to work together to produce for America today and America tomorrow.

As someone who worked for 8 years for a manufacturing company in the private sector before going into public service, I can tell you we can win in manufacturing. We can learn from our competitors, we can strengthen our workforce, we can strengthen our access to foreign markets, and we can strengthen our access to credit. We can do all of it and we can compete and win in advanced manufacturing in the United States.

One of the aspects of my own experience in the private sector that has stayed with me is that more of our manufacturing employment was in Germany than any other single country, and that often seems unlikely given that Germany actually has higher labor costs, labor protections, environmental protections, and in many ways a higher cost of doing business than almost any other advanced country. So how is it possible they are so successful? In fact, more than twice the percentage of their GDP is in manufacturing than is the case in the United States.

Why would we fight for manufacturing jobs? Why would we fight to emulate Germany's example? Because manufacturing jobs are great jobs. As the Presiding Officer and our colleague from Maine know, manufacturing jobs are high skill, high wage, high benefit, and have a positive impact on their surrounding community. They also need something. They need ongoing R&D, cutting-edge research, continuous improvement and innovations in order to remain at the cutting edge of productivity.

What we are going to talk about on the floor today is a bill that learns from the lessons of our most successful European competitor, Germany. Germany has more than 60 manufacturing hubs located all over their country. These manufacturing hubs are in places where universities are doing cutting-edge technical research and companies are beginning to deploy these new technologies in manufacturing and the workforce that are needed to acquire the skills to be successful in these new areas of manufacturing all work in coordination. That is something we can, by working in a bipartisan way here in this Senate, advance, and advance rapidly, here in the United States.

The Senator from Maine and I are going to talk about a bill--the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act--which has 14 cosponsors and is an indication of its broad base of bipartisan support. It has long been led by Senators Brown of Ohio and Blunt of Missouri, a bipartisan team, and to that they have added a great initial leadership team with Senator Stabenow, Senator Levin, Senator Reed, and Senator Schumer, all Democrats, as well as Senator Graham, Senator Kirk, Senator Collins, Senator Wicker, and Senator Boozman, all Republicans. Most recently our wonderful colleague, Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, has joined us.

This bill has been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the U.S. Conference of Mayors to the United Auto Workers, and many more organizations at the national and local level, which is another indicator of how diverse its support is from across the country and many different sectors. This is a bill I have reason to hope can not just get a lot of endorsements from the private sector and not just a lot of endorsements from cosponsors here in the Senate but can actually move through regular order to be taken up and considered by the committee of jurisdiction, to be taken up here on the floor, and actually signed into law by the President of the United States. I am hopeful that could happen partly because this is good policy.

There are already a number of hubs that have been established by Federal agencies spending money that has already been authorized and appropriated for specific research areas where the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense need to do work to develop cutting-edge manufacturing capacity in the United States.

I think if this law gets taken up on a bipartisan basis and is improved, refined, and debated in committee and here on the floor, we actually have a shot at advancing a process that will be wide open and will allow elements of the Federal Government, in partnership with the private sector, to leverage cutting-edge research and deploy whole new technologies across this country.

I am excited by it, and I know my colleague is as well. I will briefly state why Senator King is a great colleague to join all of us who have served as sponsors on this bill. He has previously worked in the private sector in clean energy. He has previously served as the Governor of the State of Maine and worked closely with the University of Maine and has a sense of how publicly funded research at a cutting-edge university, investment in workforce skills, and the deployment of new and innovative technologies in clean energy can work together to grow manufacturing, grow job opportunities, and grow our economy.

I invite my colleague to address his experience in Maine and why he has joined this broad group of cosponsors on this promising and bipartisan manufacturing bill.

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Madam President, I thank my colleague from Maine for sharing his personal experience both as Governor and for his work and partnership with the University of Maine and their composites center and his understanding of the importance of a modern, skilled workforce in order to take advantage of the work we are hoping to catalyze through this bill.

I wish to summarize across three large areas. This bill, if enacted, would take advantage of linkages, leverage, and labor in a way that would grow lasting middle-class jobs. All of us want to work together to find a way to give American workers and families a fair shot, to give them a fair shot at the kind of middle-class quality of life that dominated over the last 50 years. As my colleague said, it was because of the GI bill and its investment in education, it was because of innovation and competitiveness, and it was because of a skilled workforce that we were able to dominate the world in manufacturing for much of the last 50 years of the last century. If we are to seize this moment and regain our global leadership not just in the productivity sector of our manufacturing but also in the base, in the employment of our manufacturing, we have to do the sorts of things this bill imagines.

We have research being done in national labs, in federally funded national labs--fundamental research. That is wonderful. We have applied research on composites being done at the University of Delaware and at the University of Maine and every other State university that does higher research. We have manufacturers trying to take advantage of new technologies and new opportunities. This bill will link them all together to create regional hubs that allow the researchers, the private sector, and the new employees to all come together.

It also, as my colleague mentioned, leverages private sector funds. Every one of the four hubs announced to date is a more than a 1-to-1 match; 2 or 4 or, in one case, 8-to-1 match of private sector dollars to public sector dollars.

Last, it invests heavily in training and in skills and making sure the workforce is ready as these new technologies get out there.

I wish to describe the reach of some of these linkages and partnerships for a moment. Let me take a second and take a walking tour, if I could, of the four hubs that have been finalized so far.

For example, the one in Youngstown, OH, deals with 3D manufacturing. This is a relatively new, cutting-edge technology that radically alters the scale of early stage manufacturing and what is possible in terms of prototyping, and then, I think fairly soon, what is possible in terms of customized, unit-by-unit manufacturing. It has enormous promise. But if we are going to stay competitive globally in manufacturing, when there is something new invented in the United States, we have to also make sure it is made in the United States. So this is the sort of hub that makes that possible.

There are four hubs, and I will mention them briefly: the one in Ohio, the one in Raleigh, NC, the one in Detroit, and the one in Chicago. But they don't just engage the universities and the workforce and the companies right in that immediate community. They benefit from national networks. For example, General Dynamics and Honeywell are two of the very large national footprint firms partnering with the Youngstown hub. Universities from Arizona State to Florida State are collaborating in the wide bandgap semiconductor work in Raleigh, NC. Researchers from the University of Kentucky, the University of Tennessee, Notre Dame, and Ohio State are partners with the hub that is in Detroit. There are researchers from Boulder, Indiana, Notre Dame, Louisville, Iowa, Nebraska, UT, Austin, and Wisconsin that are partnering with the hub in Chicago.

So what are these hubs? Are they just some diffuse academic teams that share names and a little bit of data with each other? No. If there were, for example, to be a hub in Maine on composites, we would find researchers at the University of Delaware who have done great work in composites and companies doing work in composites partnering with the fundamental research being done, let's say, hypothetically, at the University of Maine, and learning about how to deploy that new technology in ways that would benefit the local workforce and the local manufacturers.

That is why there is so much leverage coming out of these linkages. That is why these hubs have been so generative and so powerful in Germany's experience. It is a way to harness our Federal investment in research by the national labs and by State universities with the energy of the private sector and the capacity of our manufacturers to relentlessly innovate.

We have a very broad menu of bipartisan manufacturing bills that have been taken up and discussed in this Chamber. This one--this manufacturing hubs bill--has some of the broadest support and I think some of the best reasons for it to be considered in committee and taken up on this floor later this spring. It is my real hope our colleagues will join us in doing so.

Let me yield back to my colleague from Maine.

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I thank my colleague for joining me in this colloquy on manufacturing, both broadly and more specifically on this bill. I am grateful for the leadership that Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, as the cochairs of the Senate Manufacturing Caucus, have shown on this particular bill and the passion and the perseverance that Senators Brown and Blunt have shown in bringing this great idea into legislative form and in advancing it.

There are so many other bills that we can and should take up that will bring strength and vitality to the American manufacturing sector. But it is my real hope that S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act will be the next in a series of important bipartisan manufacturing bills that we will take up to make sure we are doing our job to help grow high quality American jobs.

I yield the floor.

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