David Obey: “I plead fully guilty in resisting the idea that American prosperity can only be expanded by further suppressing worker…”

“I plead fully guilty in resisting the idea that American prosperity can only be expanded by further suppressing worker wages. In my view, when we try to disallow Davis-Bacon rules, that is what we do. Now, my colleagues may call that big labor bosses, but I call that hard-working construction workers in towns like Wausau and Stevens Point and Superior and Park Falls and Wisconsin Rapids who work physically a whole lot harder than anybody in this Chamber that I am looking at right now, whose bodies wear out a whole lot faster than the bodies of anybody I am looking at right now in this Chamber. Lots of folks wearing suits, very comfortable on comfortable salaries, lecturing unions about how they ought to keep their wages down for their members because they are too inflationary. What a joke. What a joke. I also make no apology whatsoever about wanting to be able to hold HMOs accountable in a court of law if they take actions or require doctors to take actions that injure patients.”