On the recordDecember 19, 2013
I come to the floor once again to talk about manufacturing jobs. This week, under Senator Amy Klobuchar's leadership, the Joint Economic Committee released a report that thoroughly and thoughtfully lays out why manufacturing jobs have such promise and how Congress can act to help spur manufacturing job creation now and into the future. The report shows that today manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs, that they pay better than jobs in any other sector in wages and benefits, and that they help create more local service sector jobs, that they contribute more to the local economy, and that manufacturers invest the most in private sector R&D of any sector in our country. Manufacturing, as the Presiding Officer well knows, has long played an important role in our Nation's economy, has served as our economic backbone, and has built the American middle class. But over the past 60 years, manufacturing in our country has changed, gradually and then dramatically. As our economy and the world have changed, so has the nature of manufacturing and the playing field on which we can and must compete. Due to global competition and the worst recession since the Great Depression, we lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States in the first decade of this century. We are now on our way back, but we are well short of where we were in 2000. We have gained 550,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 3 years, and that gives me real hope.…
