Political Quotes

“This really, Mr. Speaker, is an assault on average American working persons and their families. This bill will come to the floor with a cut of 31 percent in enforcement for health and safety protections. At a time when 55,000 American workers a year are killed on the job, when tens of thousands more are permanently disabled each year from work-related injuries and diseases, we are going to cut the agency that enforces worker safety by 33 percent. There is a cut in the dislocated workers' program of 31 percent. Now I happen to come from an area where, in 13 counties in southwestern Pennsylvania, about 150,000 workers were dislocated from the manufacturing industries. We have to retrain those workers. We are trying to cut back on welfare, we are trying to make sure that people have work at a time that we are saying if you are dislocated because your company shuts down or because something else has happened, that we are not going to retrain you for work anymore. We are going to cut that back by 31 percent. Mr. Speaker, all the worker safety is being cut, including MSHA, which has really cut down on the number of mine deaths.”