Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1314, Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act, and Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendments to H.R. 644, Fighting Hunger Incentive Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. LYNCH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, prior to coming to Congress, I worked for a while as an ironworker at the Quincy shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. I was a welder.

Unfortunately, because of bad trade policy, that shipyard closed down, and thousands of workers were laid off. Later on, I also worked at the General Motors facility in Framingham, Massachusetts, and the company decided to close that plant down, while they opened three new ones in Mexico. I have seen what lousy trade policy can do.

The fundamental problem with our trade policy is that it is negotiated in secret by multinational corporations who are basically hiring foreign labor at very low wages, move the jobs overseas, and then export the products back into the United States.

If you look at some of the minimum wages for the countries that we are dealing with in this trade agreement for Malaysia and Vietnam, it is less than $1 an hour for the minimum wage in those countries, and they maintain those low wages so that they can attract business. It is a race to the bottom.

I do want to say that, as part of my job with the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, I have had a chance to go to South Korea and Japan to see how our trade agreements have been working out there.

I was in South Korea for several days, and just on my own, with my staff, I looked for an American car for several days. We were in traffic a lot. South Korea is a booming industrial country, major highways. I saw hundreds of thousands of cars.

I saw two--two--United States cars. One was the one I was driving in from the Embassy, and the second car was my security detail behind me. Those were the only two U.S. cars, only two U.S. cars.

Our trade with Japan--I was in Japan as well. You need a detective to find a U.S. car in Japan. That is the plain and simple fact. They import $1 billion worth of U.S.-manufactured products in auto and the air industry; we import $25 billion.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts just to ask one simple question: What was that trade deal that you were talking about?

Mr. LYNCH. The Korea-U.S. trade agreement.

Mr. SESSIONS. Two years ago?

Mr. LYNCH. Two years ago.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thought you said you lost your job?

Mr. LYNCH. What is that? No, no, no. The job I lost--you were talking to people--the job I lost, 2,700 workers lost at the GM plant, those plants were reopened in Mexico.

Mr. SESSIONS. When was that? What trade deal?

Mr. LYNCH. That was right after NAFTA. That was another bad trade agreement.

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