American Jobs

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because the American people keep asking: Where have all the good jobs gone? And I truly appreciate my colleagues, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York and Congressman Paul Tonko of New York, for joining me tonight.

We are talking about jobs that can create a middle-class way of life for the people who occupy them as well as local businesses, jobs that produce living wages, that produce good health benefits and pensions and 401(k)s you can depend upon.

Now, since the 1980s, unlike any period following World War II, because the United States is importing more than we are exporting, we actually have lost millions and millions of jobs.

People complain about a budget deficit. The reason we have a budget deficit is because we have a trade deficit. In fact, since the mid-1970s, every single trade agreement the United States has signed of any consequence has resulted in more and more and more red ink.

Go to any store in this country. I don't care if you are trying to buy a suit or an automobile or curtains, I really don't care what it is, if you can find something made in America, that is a discovery.

What does that mean? It means that rather than exporting more than we import, we have been driving down the living standard of most Americans decade after decade. Jobs here disappear while capital moves abroad and exploits penny wage workers who have no hope for a better life because they live in places that have no Democratic values.

It is a shocking number to put on the record, but since the mid-1990s, this country has amassed over $4.3 trillion in trade deficit--and that is a conservative estimate--amounting to a job loss of over 8.5 million good jobs. That is what this red ink is all about. It is a shocking figure. The American people, they sort of know it innately, but when you really put it up there they go, ``Yeah.'' That is what happened.

If you look here, this shows that, with more imports, you get fewer jobs. When the trade deficit keeps getting worse, if you are out of a job yet, keep buying foreign. I am not against trade, I am for balanced trade, but I am not for trade that puts our country in this kind of an economic hole.

This is just one example--and we will go back to it a little bit later--this is the most recent agreement that the United States signed called the Korea Free Trade Agreement. We were supposed to be able to sell 50,000 cars in Korea.

Guess what. We have been able to ship--here is our piddly little shipment over there--750,000 cars. Guess how many they have sent over here. Look at this arrow compared to that little tiddlywink there. Imported vehicles from Korea, over 561,000 compared to 7,450.

So when you start wondering where your job has gone, think about what has happened to these trade agreements and how they have put us deeper and deeper in the trade hole and then in the budget deficit hole.

When I ask individual Americans how their life is going under the corporate globalization model that has been accelerated by the so-called free trade agreements, if they answer honestly and if they are not a multimillionaire investor, consistently, the response is one of great disappointment and too frequently one of great distress. The middle class in America is in trouble.

It is safe to say that this is a direct result of the long list of free trade deals that have benefited only the wealthiest in the global environment in which we live, wealthy investors who can survive anywhere. In fact, they have a lot of houses--Paris, Geneva, you name it--but each of us has a house that is our most important asset.

We come from little communities across this country, and we have a right to a good life. Our people have a right to a good life because they work so hard. Trade policy is the major reason, in my opinion, that America cannot employ all Americans seeking work.

I wanted to allow my colleagues to also speak this evening. Let me just give you a couple examples, practical examples--actually, the list could go all across this floor if I were to roll it out. Fort Smith, Arkansas, ask the 1,860 workers who lost jobs at Whirlpool when production was shifted to Mexico.

How about the 300 people who worked at the Vise-Grip plant in DeWitt, Nebraska, a town of only 572 residents, who all lost their jobs, and some would say their town identity, when the company moved to China to keep the name competitive.

How about Maytag from Newton, Iowa--one of America's iconic products--shut down, moved to Monterrey, Mexico. If you look at the census statistics from the time that happened over a decade and a half ago until today, poverty in Newton has risen up to a level of 25 percent.

This is happening across this country.

How about the 535 workers who made hearing aids in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, who were laid off when the Starkey Laboratories factory moved to Mexico and China.

Every American listening knows a company or more that has done exactly the same thing. If you go down to those countries and you see how the people live, you couldn't stomach it; you simply couldn't. I have gone down to the maquiladoras in Mexico.

I have asked the workers in those factories, ``Take me to where you live,'' and they do. It is truly sad to see a tiny little crate barrel house powered by a lightbulb connected to a battery, and this is what development brings them. Come now. Come now. The world can do better than that.

13,000 citizens of our congressional district in Ohio had jobs shifted overseas, outsourced to someplace else. Oh, they know this tale all too well.

I would ask my dear colleague from New York--New York has been battered, just like Ohio has been battered--Congressman Paul Tonko, one of the greatest leaders on economic growth for our country, who has taken time tonight during a very busy week to join us here, thank you so very much for coming to the floor tonight.

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Ms. KAPTUR. Congressman Tonko, thank you so much for coming to the floor this evening.

I grew up in a family where the work ethic was really respected, and we believed in it because you could get somewhere. You worked long hours. Sometimes, you worked 7 days a week, but you could save a little bit of money.

Now, you try to save money and the banks pay you .07 percent interest or something like that, so if you are a saver, if you have a good work ethic, if you have a good savings ethic, what does the market yield you really?

What I worry about is the work ethic itself because I talk to many employers now and they say, ``Marcy, do you know what, if we have to hire 40 people,'' let's say, for part-time jobs in a retail store, they say, ``you can't believe how many people we have to go through until we find people who really want to work.''

Well, one of the things that is happening across this country is large numbers of people don't believe working counts because they have seen what has happened in their own families. We stand to lose the work ethic itself among major segments of this population. That is very worrisome to me, and we see related social problems and rising poverty.

I mentioned in the Maytag situation in Newton, Iowa--and I am not just picking on Newton, Iowa--but there was a community that absolutely lived for that company. It was invented there.

Fred Maytag is buried right there, looking over his town and parks he endowed and all the people whose lives he helped to elevate. To see poverty increase 25 percent of the total community tells you where we are headed. That is just one place, but it is all across our country.

Before I call on Congresswoman Slaughter to add her eloquent words this evening, I wanted to mention Norma McFadden, who worked in my district, one of 150 employees who made crayons for a company called Dixon Ticonderoga, one of Ohio's oldest manufacturers dating back to 1835, before the factory was closed and offshored to Mexico in 2002.

Norma, along with many of her colleagues, took advantage of what was then called ``trade adjustment assistance,'' which since has been eliminated, and she got an alternative degree as a phlebotomist.

Many of the jobs of her fellow coworkers--there were no jobs for them to go to. That poor factory in Sandusky, Ohio, just shuttered. The property hasn't been reused. These were people who made a good product, they worked for years, they were proud of their community, they were proud of their company, and all of a sudden, it was all jerked away. I can guarantee you that the people who are working those jobs outside of Mexico City do not earn a living wage.

What are we doing? What are we doing to this country and what hope do we provide to the people of other countries that their work matters? I say what we are yielding is social instability, instability.

If you look at the murders around this country and what is happening with the drug epidemic in this country, don't think there isn't a connection between hopelessness and what is happening, not to some of the wealthy people that prowl around the Capitol who have the ability to pay to get here or who have lobbying firms here or somehow want to reach a Member of Congress on some very arcane amendment that they wanted.

I am talking about the average person who will never come to Washington, who has a belief in this country, but it is starting to erode at the edges because their economic future is so uncertain.

I want to call on a real fighter for the American people, who has been a stalwart protagonist of enormous dimension here for jobs in America and for the fair treatment of workers everywhere, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, the ranking member of the Rules Committee. She is such a gifted member.

Thank you for being here tonight.

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Ms. KAPTUR. We appreciate your contributions this evening.

Following on what Congresswoman Slaughter has stated, I can guarantee you that, according to polls done by the Pew Research Center, which is a national polling organization, over half of Americans say that free trade has been about U.S. job losses. They have experienced it. They know that whether it is NAFTA, whether it is the China deal, whether it is CAFTA--in Latin America or Korea, CAFTA has operated the reverse.

Enough people have now, sadly, suffered. They have internalized what is going on, and they are wondering what has happened to this country. Not only have they lost their jobs, but because the economy hasn't grown as fast, we are seeing that there is a downward pressure on wages in this country.

I see people being hired in plants in my district now in the auto industry, which is doing better because we refinanced it a couple of years ago, but before, people used to be able to go in there and earn $20, $30 an hour.

Now, they are starting them at a little above minimum wage. They are working them 7 days a week, 10 hours a day. They are working two and three times as hard because there is this downward pressure on wages.

I mentioned Norma McFadden having worked at Dixon Ticonderoga in Ohio. I can tell you two out of every five of the displaced manufacturing workers who were actually able to be rehired had wage reductions of more than 20 percent.

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Ms. KAPTUR. I say to the gentleman, these agreements are so powerful they actually should be treated as treaties because they involve so much more than just goods. When you get into the legal right to sue and you look at what has happened to our country under these trade agreements--I don't know about Minnesota, but in our part of the country, we have something called the emerald ash borer that has eaten through all of our ash trees. It is a multibillion dollar problem. Cities like Toledo and Cleveland are losing 10 percent of their tree cover--10 percent--and those all have to be replanted. And that critter got in here in packing material. But who gets taken to court from the other country for sending in dirty soil here? There is no legal recourse.

If you look at the U.S. Department of Agriculture budget, in the invasive species account, you will find it skyrocketing as American taxpayers are being charged to try to clean up some of this mess that is happening across our country.

It isn't just the emerald ash borer. It is critters like the Asian beetle, which came in on Chinese packing crate material and is eating hardwoods all across our country. The damage is enormous, and there is no court. There is no place where we can go to hold the importer and the exporter responsible within the laws of our country.

What kind of a crazy system is this where we tie the hands of the American people?

Under NAFTA, we were told that we would have 200,000 more jobs in our country. But when NAFTA was passed, we fell into trade deficit with Mexico; and actually, we lost nearly 700,000 jobs just to Mexico because of NAFTA. So these trade agreements, they say they are one thing, but they actually come back and turn negative numbers, negative numbers.

I look at this Korean account. We were supposed to have 50,000 cars here, and all we have gotten is a handful--7,000. The Koreans have managed to sell over a half a million here.

If you go to those countries and you look at how they keep our vehicles out and how they promote their exports of parts here--the automotive repair dealers were in here a few weeks ago. I ran into them in the hallway. Why were they here? Because when they try to repair a car and the part comes in from a foreign country--let's say you are putting the hood on. The car was in an accident and you have to replace the hood. The fit isn't as good. The metal is more thin. It isn't as good a quality metal, and they can't make it fit the repair. So then the customer in our country gets mad.

These replacement parts are coming in from all over the world. It is an inferior product. It makes our repair dealers look like they are not doing a good job. It is not their fault, for heaven's sake. They are caught in this system that doesn't work for them, and it doesn't work for us. We have got to figure out a better way.

I think Congressman Tonko wanted to add a remark. I yield to the gentleman from New York.

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Ms. KAPTUR. Congressman Tonko, thank you for your passion, for the voice that you give to millions and millions of people across this country on the floor of Congress. We know we have our finger on the heart of where the American people are. It is just this city that is out of sync with where the public is, and we have to get them aligned once and for all.

You would think that a place that has been amassing mammoth trade deficits because of trade policies over the last 25 years would not be brain dead, but, apparently, some people are brain dead over on the executive side, and they have allowed America's communities to sink further and further into debt--into trade debt--and job loss. They are completely connected.

If you go to these other countries--and I had this chart up here about Korea, but Japan is the same. If you look at the number of vehicles coming here versus our vehicles going there, we are dealing with closed markets. It is not like these other places like our stuff. They figure out thousands of ways to block our products from going in. Oh, gosh. Twenty or 30 years ago, I went to Japan to figure out: Why weren't they buying U.S. cars and U.S. auto parts? I brought free spark plugs, and I said to the head of Toyota and to the head of Honda and to all of these companies, Please, we will give you free spark plugs. These were the best plugs we made in our country. Just try them out. In those days, the Japanese would only accept about 2 percent of automobiles in their market from anyplace else in the world, okay? When our market was open, over half the vehicles on our streets were from every place else in the world--made there rather than here, okay? Today, 30 years later, it is the same in Japan. They may be 3 percent of their market. They didn't even take Yugos, for heaven's sake, when those things were on the market.

You are facing closed markets abroad. You are facing mammoth trade imbalances. The most important things those brilliant people over at the National Security Council economic division should do is pay attention to the United States of America for a change and ask themselves: Why isn't this formula working?

Do you know what? Your decisions are hurting the American people, who are funding your operation over there on the executive side. Somebody had better pay attention to these mammoth, mammoth hemorrhages because I will tell you what--this recent election I don't view as an ideological one. The American people are trying to find a way to start getting a little traction in their economic way of life. They are having trouble, and this city isn't listening. The structures that are there to help the American people are completely out of kilter, and they have been out of kilter for a long time. It is not fair to the American people. It is simply not fair.

We have to raise our voices here. I know there are living rooms out there that are listening to us tonight, and they are cheering what we are saying because they have lived it. They have lived the job loss. They have scratched and tried to get two and three jobs to try to hold their families and their households together. We have seen families split up because of the lack of income, and it isn't their fault. They are trying. They are trying to get a foothold.

I remember one President. I didn't like what he said, but he said, Walk with your feet. If you have got a problem, move somewhere else.

Do you know what? Where we live, our communities, our homes, our families, our neighbors--the communities we have built together--really mean something. It is us. We have invested our lives there--our parents, our grandparents. It isn't so easily cast away. I hope that is not an old-fashioned American idea, but people have labored for years to build our libraries, to build our museums, to build our zoos, our marinas, all of our parks. You just don't so easily walk away. Our homes mean something to us. It isn't fair to the people who have contributed so much to the betterment of this country to have it so rough, and it isn't their fault.

For all of the people I meet who are homeless, for all of the people who have fallen on tough times, they want to work. These are workers. Why should workers have to go on food stamps, for heaven's sake, in the United States of America? What an embarrassment that is for this country. Then we have certain people here in the Congress who say, Oh, just cut them off. What are they supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go when their jobs have been royally outsourced elsewhere? This is not a few jobs but millions and millions.

I have had the gift in my lifetime of being able to travel, to go follow the job. Go see what happened when Trico moved out of Buffalo. Go see what happened when Mr. Coffee moved out of Cleveland. When you start following these places, then, all of a sudden, it becomes clear: oh, somebody is making a whole lot of money off of the outsourcing of jobs. Do you know what? It wasn't the people in my community. It wasn't the workers. It wasn't even the small business people. It is the capitalists who take the money--those people who are rich enough to own these companies--and who then figure out they can outsource it so they can make more money, not work with the people in these communities who have given their lives, their sweat for these places. It is so disrespectful. It is un-American. It is un-American what they are doing.

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