Rob Andrews: “I thank my friend for giving me the time. It is a vexing problem that at a time of high unemployment we have a lot of…”

“I thank my friend for giving me the time. It is a vexing problem that at a time of high unemployment we have a lot of jobs unfilled in our country because we don't have sufficient training for our people to fill those jobs. This is not a partisan problem; it's a commonsense problem. I believe it's a commonsense problem we could have solved if the parties had worked together here, but Mr. Miller, Mr. Hinojosa, Mr. Tierney, and many others on our side reached out to negotiate a consensus on this bill, and those negotiations never happened. I believe they should happen in the future and will happen in the future to give us a better work product. Here's what I think is wrong with the bill that's before us today. We absolutely have to do a better job at training our own people to fill the jobs that are vacant in this economy, but if you leave that decision as to how to do that up to State politics and State capitals, I think the evidence is pretty clear that people get left out of that job-training situation. Let's take a worker who's worked in an oil refinery or a factory and his or her job has been outsourced to another country and at the age of 50 or 55 they have to start all over again. If you leave the decision up to State politics as to whether or not that worker gets training, I think it's pretty likely that he or she won't get the training because people like that don't have a whole lot of clout in State legislatures as far as I know.…”