Dan Kildee: “I come from Flint, Michigan, a working class community. I represent Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, and it's a community that's…”

“I come from Flint, Michigan, a working class community. I represent Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, and it's a community that's proud of the fact that in this area--and it's true across the country--the notion has been that, if you work hard, if you train yourself, if you focus on a trade or go to school, you'll be paid a wage or a salary commensurate with the contribution that you make to the work that you're doing. We live in a time when we're seeing decreasing compensation for the value that the worker brings to the working place. Between 1945 and 1975, we saw worker productivity rise in this country by 97 percent, and we saw household income rise in that same 30-year period by 95 percent. There was some parity in the contribution that workers made and the compensation that they received. You fast-forward to the last 30-year period, and we've seen a period of economic growth and expansion, increased productivity--80 percent over the last 30 years-- but in real wages, a 10 percent increase in productivity. One of the reasons that we've seen such a drop is that we are not compensating the average workers for the quality and the work that they do and that they contribute to the highly productive society that we live in. This is yet another attempt to continue the race to the bottom, where we continue to see real wages go down and productivity continue to rise. I have done a tremendous amount of work in local development.…”