Political Quotes

“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.…”