Political Quotes

“last weekend 170 employees of the Mayr Bros. sawmill in Hoquim, WA, were notified that they were about to be laid off. One-hundred and seventy individual workers is not a particularly large number in connection with all of the layoffs that have taken place across the Nation during the course of the last year. But this is almost the last 170 workers for this particular mill. They are in addition to several thousand others in the area who have lost their jobs during the course of the last 4 or 5 years. Hoquim, WA, the location of the mill, is a small city of about 9,000 people. The Mayr Bros. mill is one of the few that remain in that city. It has been a mainstay of this community for 63 years at this point in its history. Hoquim, Mr. President, to put it mildly, is not a destination tourist resort by any stretch of the imagination. It is a working-class community that has provided wood and fiber and paper products for the people of the United States for the entire length and breadth of the 20th century. These layoffs, however, are from a different cause than simply the dynamics of a constantly changing economy. They are taking place because of deliberate policies imposed by the Congress and by the administration with respect to the harvest of timber in our national forests and on the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management of the United States.”