Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank Representative Smucker for holding this Special Order. Madam Speaker, as co-chair of the Career and Technical Education Caucus, I rise to highlight the importance of career and technical education for our Nation's workforce. I really appreciate all of the comments that the gentleman just mentioned, and I concur. Madam Speaker, across Rhode Island, I continue to hear from employers struggling to find skilled workers to fill open jobs in fields such as manufacturing, IT, and other trades. Hundreds of thousands of high-skilled, high-paying jobs are right now unfulfilled in our country, and this number is continuing to grow. Especially as we hear about bringing jobs back from overseas, manufacturing, just by way of example, has changed dramatically. These factories are no longer the old, dirty, noisy manufacturing factories of old that, say, our fathers or grandfathers were used to. They are now all high-tech. You see robots doing a lot of the manufacturing that require both programming and sophisticated knowledge how to run this advanced equipment. So the jobs are coming back, but they are coming back in different ways, needing different skills. And right now we need to ensure that our workforce is equipped with the tools to meet the demands of the economy to close our Nation's skills gap. We can do this by better aligning education and industry.…”