Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Minnesota for his outstanding remarks. I want to rise to make one thing clear in this debate. My friends on the other side of the aisle once again have taken up the cause of special interests at the expense of hard-working Americans. Once again they are using their new majority in the Senate to find ways to keep the rules rigged against American workers. Let's look at this. The bottom line is very simple. Middle-class incomes are declining. One of the main reasons middle-class incomes are declining is the decline of unions. That is what just about everybody who studies it says. We are now 11 percent unionized. We were 30 percent, private sector only 6 percent. The bottom line is we had a lot of poor Americans in the 1920s. Laws that were enacted by this Congress allowed unions to organize and workers, through collective bargaining, were able to gain some of the wealth from their labor. We had broad prosperity as America was unionized in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. What happened was that corporate America learned how to both prevent new unions from occurring in new industries and breaking old unions. As a result now, middle-class incomes are declining.…”