Political Quotes

“Let me just pick up on the gentleman's point, and that is essentially, if you have desperate people in Mexico who are making 50 cents an hour, who are living in shacks, whose kids may be begging out on the street, who are forced to work under the most horrendous conditions imaginable, what corporate America is saying is hey, if we can get people to work in those conditions over there, we can drive wages and working conditions down here, because what we say to the American worker is, hey, if you do not like what you are getting today, we are going to go over there. I just got a letter today from a corporate entity in the State of Vermont who told us about how high the wages are in Vermont, he could go elsewhere and so forth and so on. So I think it is not only a labor issue, it is an environmental issue, it is a union issue, and that is what our entire trade policy is about. It is the race to the bottom, it is saying to American workers, there are people in China, Mexico, throughout the world who are prepared to work for almost nothing, and we are going to lower your wages and lower your working conditions, lower the environmental standards that you work under, lower and lower and lower. Not raise the other people's, but lower ours until we have an equalized work force around the world. A very, very dangerous trend, which as the gentleman indicated, is wiping out the middle class and creating pathetically low-wage jobs.”