Tim Ryan: “And this is not by any stretch of the imagination are we saying that workers don't need to be flexible, unions don't…”

“And this is not by any stretch of the imagination are we saying that workers don't need to be flexible, unions don't need to be flexible. We are now competing with the globe. And our workers now, as we have seen in large measure through the suppression of wages and everything else, this is a global workforce where just from 1985, where it was 2.5 billion people, now it is up to almost 6 billion in the global workforce. So that in and of itself increases the level of competition for our own workers, which has led to the wage issue that we have to deal with and everything else. So we are not saying that unions don't need to be flexible. I come from an area of the country where we had a lot of steel mills. Now there is just one or two left of the integrated variety, and the tremendous, tremendous changes that the steelworkers have gone through. And I have a good friend, Gary Steinbeck, Madam Speaker, a friend back home who is subdistrict director for the United Steelworkers in Ohio, and the tremendous changes in work rules that the steelworkers have made in order to keep the industry afloat. These folks are ready to sit down and figure this out, and they know that. But our point is look what has been happening here. This is a chart, ``Change in Share of National Income from 2003 to 2004.'' The bottom 99 percent has had negative 2 percent change in their share of the national income; the top 1 percent has seen almost a 2 percent increase in their share of national income.”