The Trans-Pacific-Partnership

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the very able gentleman from
Wisconsin, Congressman Pocan, for organizing all of us this evening and
for his indefatigable efforts to tell the truth about what is happening
to the workers of our country and those around the world.

I rise with you tonight because America--our wonderful country--has a
huge ``good jobs'' deficit because we have a gigantic free trade
deficit. Our trade policies export more U.S. jobs than U.S. products.
More and more foreign imports come across our shores
than we send goods out, and the gap grows wider every decade at
extraordinary proportion. Never before in American history have so many
good jobs been outsourced off our shores. America's workers have had
income shortages--every family knows it--because America has had this
jobs hemorrhage due to the flawed, Fast Tracked free trade agreements
that have been ramrodded through this Congress.

Since 1975, when Wall Street's free trade regimen began to lock down,
America has amassed a $9.5 trillion trade deficit with the world. If
you count up every year, numbers don't lie, and this has translated
into a gigantic, unprecedented jobs loss of over 47.5 million lost
American jobs--good jobs from coast to coast, living-wage jobs, jobs
that have evaporated from our communities, jobs that have been shipped
out. We know the places as we just look at the tags on any products--
Mexico, China, Vietnam, Korea, Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Turkey,
El Salvador--to dozens of Third World nations--frankly, most very
undemocratic--where workers are treated like a bonded class. Workers
everywhere--here, too--are being treated like expendable parts. Yes,
American jobs are being shipped out to penny-wage sweatshops behind the
Iron Curtain of anonymous towns in distant countries most Americans
will never visit.

Anonymity, worker exploitation, and hidden squalor are fundamental to
free trade. And so are the stories of Americans who struggle to earn a
living, who lose their jobs and are forgotten, are forgotten in their
plight.

In our country, the impact on the average American family has been a
loss of real income of $7,000 a year. Imagine that. The public knows
it.

The people who elected me to Congress--and I thank them--have allowed
me to be a voice, to put the ugly puzzle of outsourcing together. And I
have made it my mission to travel the world to find the companies that
fled our shores. And I have traveled to find them.

I have lots of photos, and I have lots of interviews. And I have had
time to talk to unemployed Americans too--far too many--and the
exploited workers of developing nations and to visit the plants that
have been displaced from this country and built elsewhere.

The titans who run these global transnational corporations, their
operatives, and the Wall Street giants that finance them couldn't care
less about workers anywhere or the communities in which they live. And,
frankly, these new bosses of global production don't care about
democracy or the rule of law either. They pay whatever they want, and
they can pay off as they see fit.

I have seen workers making Maytag washing machines in Monterrey,
Mexico. Those used to be made in Newton, Iowa. These Mexican workers
don't earn enough to buy the very washing machines they make. And with
the jobs lost from Newton, the poverty rate in Newton has dramatically
increased in the town that Fred Maytag proudly helped build. However--I
don't know if you have noticed--the quality of those machines has gone
down too. Who can be proud of what is happening?

I have visited the homes where those workers from Monterrey live and
other maquiladora factory zones and have see firsthand their
impoverished living standards.

I have stood at a surreal location in Mexico following NAFTA's
passage called Michigan-Ohio Avenues and witnessed the jobs outsourced
from our country from a windshield wiper factory that used to be
located in New York.

I have met women in the garment industry from Honduras and El
Salvador who earn 10 cents for every T-shirt they produce in those
sweat shops down there, barricaded off behind barbed wire and
outsourced from places like the Carolinas. The women are being paid 10
cents an hour for every T-shirt that then comes in here and is sold for
$20 each at stores and shopping centers around the country. Meanwhile,
the booming garment and textile industry of the Carolinas, like the
furniture industry too, has all but disappeared, and the tens of
thousands of jobs that went with them. I visited those massive
shuttered factories, and they reminded me of the auto plants that
existed in my industrial region.

I have tracked furniture jobs to Vietnam and have seen child laborers
perched with their bare feet on the edge of large wooden bowls that
they sand and spray with lacquer paint, wearing no face masks, with no
air filters, breathing in the fumes and chemicals certain to damage
their fragile lungs and bodies.

Let me just say in closing, as an Ohio Representative, we have lost
over 5 million manufacturing jobs alone in northern Ohio since the
passage of NAFTA, which I fought with every ounce of being that I had
here in 1993. We lost that fight. A 12-votes switch here would have
made the difference. And as I speak here today, another global company,
Hugo Boss, a German-owned company, is shutting down a factory in
Brooklyn, Ohio, where workers had their pay cut 17 percent 2 years ago
to save that company. You can walk into any Hugo Boss outlet, and you
can see men's suits selling for $1,200 apiece. What a tragedy. What a
tragedy for our country. What a tragedy for workers globally.

I will say to my wonderful colleague from Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan),
thank you so much for doing this.

In terms of China--and others will cover this more completely--just
in the past year, 2013, the latest complete year of data, our country
assumed $319 billion of trade deficit with the nation of China just in
that year, just in that year with that one country. Because of that
deficit, we have lost an additional 1,595,000 more American jobs, just
with this one country in 1 year.

The answer to balanced global growth is to pay workers a living wage
and to respect their work, not exploit it. The answer to balanced
growth is to stop the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and to pry open the
closed markets of the world, starting with Japan, China, and Korea. And
the answer to balanced growth and fair trade is to stop the hemorrhage
of more jobs from this country by defeating any more deals like NAFTA
and all of its offspring, and the Fast Tracking of more jobs that they
are trying to do in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

It is time for America to stand up and for this Congress to stand up
with the American workers and communities.

Again, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me this evening.

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