Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Ohio for introducing this amendment and, once again, for this dialogue on an important issue. I will remind my colleague that, although he brings up the fact that this has been decided in the Chamber twice already in other similar circumstances, it's not really the same because, last Friday, of course, we found out that our unemployment rate is rising in the country. It's now 9.1 percent again. We only created 54,000 jobs, not the 200,000 jobs we'd hoped we would create and certainly much fewer than the 150,000 jobs we need to create in order to get back to full employment. That's how many we need to create every month. What this amendment means, very simply, is that we are going to have to spend 10 to 20 percent more on every single project that ends up in a project labor agreement--and more projects will. If more projects wouldn't, then the advocates wouldn't care about whether we put this provision in. It clearly will result in project labor agreements, so let's review what a project labor agreement does. First and foremost, it increases the cost 10 to 20 percent on every project. Now, Mr. Chairman, if you or I or people in my congressional district were going to contract to build something around their homes, they wouldn't put a provision in normally that says that we're only going to hire union contractors. {time} 1440 They will go out. They will get the bids. They will go out.…”