[Congressional Record: April 10, 1997 (House)]
[Pages H1415-H1419]
 
         DEMOCRATIC ANSWER TO REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL INACTION

  Mr. BONIOR. Mr. Speaker, before I begin my remarks, let me just say 
that I paid special attention to the gentleman from Virginia who spoke 
with respect to China and also to my Republican friend and colleague 
from Florida, [Mr. Foley] who spoke with respect to NAFTA and its 
shortcomings. I cannot say how gratified I am to hear my colleagues on 
this side of the aisle starting to understand and recognize the 
limitations of some of these international agreements and treaties that 
we have entered into, and I am pleased that they are speaking out.
  Mr. Speaker, I was disturbed to read in this week's papers that the 
Speaker is back at it again. For 3 months the American people have 
waited for the Republican party to begin to move on an agenda, to 
propose a budget, to address the serious problems we have with health 
and with education, health for our children, reforming our campaign 
finance system. Yet day after day we show up here for work and nothing. 
No budget, no bills scheduled, very few votes, and so it is not hard to 
see why most people feel like nothing is getting done in Washington. 
Yet the Speaker, who has done nothing to move an agenda for working 
families, has instead decided that it is time to launch attacks, to 
distort the facts and to demonize those who disagree with him. The same 
Speaker who seems to be running from his own personal responsibilities 
for violating rules of this House and subverting our campaign finance 
laws has accused others of rigging the game. So it is no wonder that 
the American people have grown cynical and tired of Washington's 
political games.
  Last year the Gingrich revolution with all its excesses and missteps 
and extremism was exposed for what it was. It was a radical attempt to 
turn back the clock on progress for American families.

                              {time}  1300

  But let us not forget the Gingrich revolutionaries do not just want 
to cut Medicare and education to give tax breaks to the wealthy. They 
brag about their opposition to Medicare, they tried to eliminate the 
Department of Education, they tried to let polluters rewrite 
environmental laws. And let us also not forget that it was our efforts 
in this House that stopped that revolution. And let us not forget that 
we did not do it alone. Working men and women throughout the country 
stood up and said we want to protect Medicare, we want to invest in 
education, and we want to preserve our environment.
  Now, Newt Gingrich has learned nothing, I think, from the experiences 
of the last 2 years. In fact, just yesterday in a frantic drive to 
recapture the fervor of his lost revolution, the Speaker proposed a set 
of massive tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. This 
Gingrich tax would give away to the wealthy--these tax breaks would 
cost over 300 billion over the next 5 years, $300 billion, and what is 
more than that, what could happen if this occurs is the following:
  You cannot do this. You cannot have breaks in those magnitudes 
without breaking the budget. It cannot be done without wrecking 
Medicare. It cannot be done without savaging education.
  At a time when we should be coming to some consensus on how to 
balance our budget here, the Speaker seems more concerned about 
coddling his wealthy donors.
  The Gingrich speech comes just one day after a story in the 
Washington Times revealed that wealthy donors warned the GOP that if 
they do not get their tax breaks, the Republican Party will not get 
their money. It was as simple and clear as that. There is no end to the 
Gingrich Republicans' effort to pander to these wealthy special 
interests.
  Now, this week we were supposed to take up a bill that would have 
saved middle-income homeowners hundreds of dollars a year on their 
mortgage insurance, and I might add that this bill received broad 
bipartisan support in the committee. But at the last minute the 
Republican leadership bowed to the pressure of the special interests 
and pulled the bill.
  We should have passed that bill. It would have saved a middle-income 
family buying a $119,000 home $70 a month. That bill now has been 
shelved because the special interests got to their leadership. No 
relief for homeowners, no help for middle income families trying to 
balance their budgets, no balanced budgets for America. And we get from 
the reborn revolution, all we get from it is tax breaks for their 
wealthy donors.
  So the American people are tired of this. They are tired of seeing 
their hard-earned dollars, their hopes for a secure retirement, their 
promise for their kids' education, threatened by a relentless 
Republican drive to reward the wealthy donors.
  The Speaker may be right. The game in this country may be rigged. But 
it is not rigged by the working families who struggle every day to make 
ends meet. It is not rigged by the working men and women who organize 
and fight back when they see our rights are threatened. It is rigged by 
the wealthy interests that the Speaker seems so eager to please with 
these new tax giveaways.
  This country needs a real debate on our different political 
philosophies, a debate about some of the most fundamental questions 
that we face today:
  What is the role of government? What are the possibilities of limits 
on the free market? What is the meaning of citizenship? Of political 
participation itself?
  So let us have that debate, and let us remember our own history when 
we have it. I believe that somewhere along the line our politics has 
gotten disconnected from the American people. People no longer see a 
link between their lives and politics, between their lives and the 
forces controlling our economy, between their lives and the real 
challenges that we are facing as individuals and as a nation, and this 
disconnection has helped create a feeling of powerlessness, of 
frustration, of alienation.
  Our challenge is to try to plug people back in. We need to give 
people a reason to believe again. We need to reestablish a connection 
between people and their Government and between people and our economy, 
and I want to talk about a group that the Speaker attacked and 
demonized just several days ago.
  To me the labor movement is fundamental to this challenge of 
reconnection. Over the years more than anybody else, the labor movement 
has helped connect people to politics in a meaningful way. By fighting 
for the day-to-day needs of the American families, by representing 
values beyond what we could see, unions have brought dignity and depth 
to our democracy. They have helped put a human face on change, and we 
need that human face today more than ever. At stake is not just the 
future of our families, it is the fate of our democracy.
  Today I want to talk to you about some of the ways that unions can be 
the missing link we so badly need in this changing world. Recently I 
was driving out of town, and I passed underneath a bridge, and on the 
bridge there was a big banner that read ``Unions, the people who 
brought you the weekend,'' and I thought that was a creative reminder 
of the role that unions have played in America, but then you wondered 
how many people really understood what that means.
  Now growing up, I could not help but hear that message because I grew 
up in a union household, and for 30 years my grandfather was a member 
of the Automobile Workers, and every single morning I got up with him 
and watched him go off to work in the old Dodge main plant at 
Hamtramck, Michigan. We were first generation middle class, and by that 
I mean we understood that the only reason we were middle class was 
because of the battles that working people had fought and won.
  Unions were not something you really had to discuss; it was just part 
of us. By simple osmosis, just being there, you were brought up to 
believe that certain rights were fundamental, as fundamental to the 
idea of liberty as free speech itself, and we held these rights to be 
self-evident, that everyone has a right to earn their own bread, that 
every person is endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among 
these rights are the right to organize, to collectively bargain and the 
right to strike, and based on those rights we were brought up to 
believe in certain principles, that if you help a company make money, 
you deserve a raise, and if you get sick, you deserve good health care, 
that if you put in a lifetime of loyal service day after day, week 
after week, month after month, year after year, you deserve a secure 
retirement and a pension. And if you do your job well, nobody has a 
right to take that job away from you.
  So we understood that if we got up every morning and worked hard, we 
could earn a pretty good life, and through the decades of battles both 
big and small corporations grudgingly came to accept certain 
responsibilities as well, that if they paid their workers fairly and 
gave something back to the community they would have loyal workers and 
they would have loyal customers.
  Now to us that was the collective bargain, that is what community was 
all about, and for about 30 years that basic formula helped this 
country build a middle class that could afford to buy the products, the 
Zeniths, the Chevys that people made.
  And of course when I tell this story to students, they look at me as 
if I am an old quaint professor telling them stories about the Great 
Frontier, and I guess who can blame them because if you read the 
stories that are abundant in the papers today and you listen to the 
stories on radio and on television, you kind of wonder.
  Disney, the all-American company that I grew up with and ran home to 
watch after school, they announced that they are paying one person $90 
million, and what does that person do to earn $90 million? Well, he got 
fired. He was the President and did not do a good job, and they fired 
him. As a going away present, they gave him as a severance package $90 
million. And of course the man who actually did the firing just signed 
a contract at the Washington Post, the paper in this town said, that 
paid him $776 million over the next 10 years.
  Yet how does Disney reward the people here at home? It moves jobs 
over to Haiti, where it pays Haitian workers 28 cents an hour to stitch 
its clothes, and yet when Disney stockholders had a chance to ban 
sweatshop labor, they voted against it.
  And we see examples like this every day. Nike announced a 77-percent 
increase in its worldwide sales. The same day a new report comes out 
that Nike manufactures most of its product in Asian sweatshops, where 
it pays its people about 30 cents an hour. IBM tells 120 secretaries 
that for the good of the company they have to take a 10-percent pay 
cut. Same week, same very week, its top five executives are rewarded a 
bonus totaling $5.8 million.
  And the most perverse part of it all is that the corporations who are 
trying to do the right things, who treat their people well, who reward 
loyalty, are often penalized for it. Our economy makes it harder for 
them to be competitive.
  So I am here today to tell you we cannot keep moving this way as a 
Nation. The America of our hopes and dreams will not be if we grow 
complacent about the fact that the gap between the rich and the poor is 
at a 50-year high. It will not be if we accept the fact that Manpower 
Temporary Services is now America's No. 1 employer. It cannot be if we 
accept the fact that CEO's who made 12 times more than workers in 1960 
and 35 times more in 1974 now make 200 times more than their workers 
today. And it certainly will not be if, God forbid, we should accept 
that these things are some sort of unavoidable byproduct of the modern 
economy.
  So this just is not a question of jobs and paychecks. It is about a 
larger vision of our democracy and our way of life. It is about how we 
treat each other, it is about whether we are going to move forward 
together or we are going to split apart at the seams.
  Now, there are some people who are trying to forge an alternative 
reality. In a runaway world, a world of runaway corporations and 
declining participation and growing income disparity and social unrest, 
there are some people challenging the New World Order that we live in. 
We see them in Las Vegas, where 4,000 people just won new rights. We 
see them in California, where 20,000 strawberry workers are preparing 
to march for justice this weekend. We see them across America, where 
3,000 college students have fanned out to organize last summer. We see 
them in every city and every State, where people refuse to accept the 
way things are as a way that they have to be.
  The labor movement has helped build American middle class and made 
the American dream for millions of families. If we want that dream to 
be vibrant, to be alive and to have new meaning for a new generation of 
America, we need to revitalize that very important component of our 
society. Labor has got to get back to basics, it has got to make 
organizing its top priority again, it has got to reach out to people it 
has never organized before, it has got to reach across borders to form 
new alliances in other countries so workers there are not being used as 
a hedge by our corporations to bring down our wages here, it has got to 
put a new face on its movement, it has got to work with religious 
leaders and community leaders to regain moral authority, and I am going 
to think about that in a second because I think that is the key missing 
ingredient to challenging the corporate greed and the other greed in 
our society. It has got to embrace a new spirit of self-criticism, and 
it has got to stay true to that vision that we learned all those years 
ago.
  Today I want to talk to you about three areas where I believe these 
goals meet their most severe challenge. I want to talk to you about the 
role of unions, the reality of this new global economy and the 
challenge of organizing.
  You know, the United Auto Workers have a saying printed right there 
on their web page. It says, ``Before you know where you are going, you 
have to know where you have been,'' and I think the labor unions have 
played three fundamental roles in America, roles they are well-suited 
to play again.
  First, unions have been a historic link between rising wages and 
rising productivity.
  Now what do I mean? Well, this hard link, this link between how hard 
you work and what you earn, did not just exist in union shops. Unions 
helped establish a value for the whole society. When unions were at 
their peak from 1947 to 1973, American workers gave an almost 90 
percent increase in productivity, and in return their real wages 
increased by 99 percent. But as union membership has fallen the past 20 
years, this link has been fractured. From 1973 to 1982, workers got 
only half as much of an increase in real wages as they gave in 
productivity, and from 1982 to 1994 they only got a third as much. 
Today unions represent just 10 percent of the private sector, and all 
told since 1979 productivity has gone up 24 percent, but the real 
earnings for workers have gone down 12 percent.
  Little wonder that most people feel like they are part of that Abbott 
and Costello routine where Bud Abbott says to Lou Costello, ``Lou, if 
you got 50 bucks in one pocket and a hundred in the other, what do you 
got?'', and Costello says, ``Somebody else's pants.'' I mean people are 
being squeezed, and unions can make a difference.
  In Chicago, IL, for example, grocery clerks at the Kroger Co. who are 
represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers, they earn $12.50 
an hour, with health and pension benefits. That same employee in Kansas 
City working for the same company makes $8 an hour, with no benefits, 
because that person is not represented by a union.

                              {time}  1315

  If unions can recouple the link between wages and productivity, if 
they can reestablish the social compact and remind people that they can 
demand a fair share of the profits, they will shrink income 
disparities, they will strengthen our middle class, and we will be 
laying the groundwork for renewal of our democratic institutions.
  Second: Unions have helped remind us that the economy exists for 
people and not the other way around, and by doing so, they have 
articulated an alternative set of values to corporate greed. If we are 
going to create a sense of community and participation in society, we 
have got to create a sense of community in the workplace. At work, as 
in society, it matters for people to work together, to have rights 
together; it matters for people to care about each other. It is an 
alternative set of values that believes people will act for reasons 
beyond pure self-interests.
  Bob Kuttner reminds us in his new book, now let me paraphrase: Even 
in America, not everything is for sale. People have civic and social 
selves.
  Unions, as a form of collective egalitarian action, strengthen those 
values. Fundamentally, unions at their best are an example of democracy 
in action. So it was no accident in Poland in the 1980's that the 
Solidarity movement was equated with democracy, because when they 
argued for equal rights and worker rights, when they demanded to be 
treated with dignity and respect and fairness, they were not just 
arguing for those values in the workplace, they were arguing for those 
values in society. And with that larger vision came a certain moral 
authority. When labor was at its height, unions used to use that moral 
authority as a brake on runaway greed.
  Now, over the past few decades, unions have lost that moral 
authority. They have ceded the higher ground, and they shoulder a fair 
amount of the blame. Too often they turned inward, they stopped 
organizing, they stopped focusing on the larger work force, and worked 
hard to protect what they had.
  Then, as their membership shrank and the workplace changed, they fell 
further and further behind. They fought their own bureaucracy, and they 
made it easy for people like the Speaker to paint them as special 
interests. Where unions were once seen as allies of the middle class, 
they were now seen as the enemy. Where unions were once celebrated for 
raising wages, Ronald Reagan made America resent the fact that union 
members were earning more than anybody else, and that resentment, 
unfortunately, continues to this day.
  But this can only go on for so long. Republicans have already 
overplayed their hand. The public is engaged in a backlash against the 
revolution of last Congress, and I think that was a harbinger of things 
to come. In cities and towns across the country, unions are joining 
together with religious leaders and respected community advocates to 
regain moral authority, to shame corporations into treating workers 
with dignity and respect.
  The American people know greed is not enough, and block by block, 
town by town, city by city, we need to bring public pressure to bear, 
because it is the only way change is going to happen. That is the way 
it has always been. You have a force that gets out of control, that 
exudes greed, and you need a countervailing force to react to it. 
Historically that has been the pattern in this country and often the 
pattern in Western civilization.
  Third, the union has been a part of a larger movement outside the 
work force that has fought for social reform. They have been the link 
between free markets and democratic rights. So when I hear my friend, 
the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Armey] on this side of the aisle say that 
the free market alone brings progress, I wonder where he studied his 
economics, because history has shown just the opposite.
  It is in places where the free labor movement was strong, in France, 
in England, in the United States, where we have pensions, the 8-hour 
day, the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, severance pay, paid holidays, 
paid sick leave, paid vacation, maternity leave, seniority, and not 
just for union members and not just at the workplace. We also have 
Medicare and Social Security and student loans and, in some places, 
health care and child care, all brought to you, all brought to you by a 
coalition of progressives working to bring about change and led by the 
labor movement in this country.
  Unions have been a part of an effort to broaden the meaning of 
democracy and democratic rights. There is a reason why dictators prefer 
to deal with individuals, because when you divide people, you conquer.
  The first thing that Hitler and Mussolini and Pinochet did was to ban 
unions. The first thing China did after Tiananmen Square was to ban 
unions. In Singapore and Chile, rapid industrialization has created 
systems where labor rights are not fully recognized and wages are low 
and the environment is not fully protected. The one thing President 
Carlos Salinas did in Mexico, he absolutely refused to discuss during 
NAFTA, the one thing was unions.
  So as unions get weaker in this country, it is not surprising that we 
see an assault on Social Security and on Medicare and on education. But 
as our own history has shown, with each new wave of union growth, each 
time labor as a movement reaches out to organize the unorganized, there 
is a new wave of democratic participation and social reform that has 
followed. I believe that we are at such an historic moment in America 
today. These are the historic roles unions have played and can play 
again.
  But today we are being challenged by a whole new set of rules. The 
global economy has changed the rules for everybody, and I believe the 
labor movement has to change to meet those challenges. I think it is 
important to differentiate between the real threats of the global 
economy and the perceived threats of the global economy.
  I think it is also important to understand that the global economy 
looks different depending upon where you are standing. In his new book, 
and I would encourage those of you who are interested in the topic of 
globalization to read it, William Greider's new book, ``One World, 
Ready or Not,'' he paints a picture of the global economy as a giant 
farm combine that reaps as it destroys; it plows across fields and 
fence rows with a fierce momentum that is both exhilarating and 
frightening. But despite all of the skillful hands on board in 
Greider's vision, there are no hands at the wheel. It is a very vivid 
image. But I disagree; there are hands at the wheel, and they are 
controlled by people who run our multinational corporations.
  From our perspective here today, we can talk about labor in the 
United States and labor in Japan and labor in China, and we can 
differentiate between them. We can talk about environmental standards 
here in the United States and environmental standards in Mexico, and we 
can see very clear lines of differences, but if you are looking at the 
global economy from the perspective of multinational corporations, you
do not see clear lines of authority. Multinationals have little or no 
respect for state boundaries or worker rights. Whatever laws we pass 
from country to country, whatever rules we set down, they regard them 
as fence rows to be plowed over.
  So the Nikes of the world run off to Vietnam, the Disneys run off to 
Haiti, Zenith moves to Mexico, corporation after corporation pits 
workers against each other and seeks out the lowest common denominator, 
and by doing so, it drives all of our standards down. Now, this is the 
reality of the global economy today. We all know these threats are very 
real.
  Cornell University recently did a study for the Department of Labor, 
a study, by the way, which the Labor Department refused to release, and 
they found that 62 percent of the companies in America are now using 
countries like Mexico as a bargaining chip to drive down wages and 
living standards in America. We were promised during NAFTA that wages 
would go up from $1 an hour or higher. It is 3\1/2\ years later, and 
the wages have changed. They have gone down, though, to 70 cents an 
hour, and that pressure of their wage south of our border is giving 
corporations all over this country the ability to keep wages low or to 
drive wages down or to take benefits away from our workers.
  This changing world order has brought about an ideological shift as 
well. Even among liberals and progressives, the old New Deal Coalition 
in this country was built on the fundamental notion that the free 
market would not automatically take care of people's needs. Goods like 
retirement savings, health care for the poor and the elderly, public 
education, and eventually environmental and safety regulations were 
needed to supplement the market and restrain its success. We came to 
understand that to advance certain rights, you need a countervailing 
force on the power of the large corporations and the rapacious 
instincts of the market.
  Today, when it comes to the global marketplace, even some people in 
my own party seem to be abandoning the commitment when it comes to the 
global economy. People who would never argue that the hidden hand of 
the free market would provide for all social goods here at home seem to 
forget these lessons when you substitute the words ``free trade'' for 
``free market.'' They buy into the notion that there is nothing you can 
do to affect the global economy except race as fast as you can to 
compete. Of course in doing so, they are reinforcing an ideology that 
would leave us increasingly powerless, impoverished, and unprincipled.
  Now, for more than 40 years, America fought the cold war to advance 
some very fundamental beliefs about human rights. We argued for freedom 
of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to organize. But now that the 
cold war has ended, we as a nation, we have abandoned those rights. Our 
fundamental pursuit the past 8 years has been the protection of 
property rights. We tried to persuade China to observe patent and 
copyright laws. We forced Mexico to protect intellectual property like 
CD's.
  In Mexico today, if a compact disc is pirated, there are trade 
sanctions, criminal sanctions; people can go to jail. But if a worker 
in Mexico tries to organize and gets fired, they get fired, or if a 
community is forced to bathe in rivers where toxins run, there are no 
sanctions, there is no enforcement, there are just consultations; all 
they get is talk.
  Four years ago, almost 4 years ago, during the NAFTA debate, many of 
us came to this well and on this floor and we argued that America needs 
a trade policy that will work to open new markets in the same way it 
works to protect labor rights and environmental rights and jobs, 
because history has shown that if we do not address the environment and 
wages and working conditions directly in our trade agreements, they 
never get addressed at all. But of course these things were left out of 
the core NAFTA agreement, and America has paid a price.
  I remember in debating NAFTA, we had a $2 billion trade surplus. We 
had a surplus. We had a surplus. We had more going out. We were 
producing here and sending more out than was coming into America. But 
today our trade deficit with Mexico has reached a record $16 billion, 
and workers in the maquiladores no longer make $1 an hour, as I said, 
they make 70 cents an hour. Along the border, the environment is still 
so bad that the American Medical Association recently called it a 
cesspool of infectious diseases.
  Seventy percent of the cocaine coming into America and 25 percent of 
the heroin now comes in from Mexico. Why? Because NAFTA opened up the 
border. And down in Texas, 11,000 trucks now pass over the border every 
day. They call it the wave line. For every truck that gets inspected, 
199 do not. They just wave them through.
  In New York a few weeks ago, a policeman pulled over a truck, they 
opened the door, they saw bananas. Once they started to dig, they found 
bundles of cocaine. And it is happening every day. Drugs are coming in, 
jobs are going out, wages are being suppressed, benefits are being lost 
by our workers, and we know corporations are not going to do anything 
about it.
  The multinational corporations are doing just fine paying people 70 
cents an hour; they are doing just fine with an open border. Yet, when 
workers in Mexico try to organize, try to form unions, try to fight for 
better pay for their families, try to take away that bargaining chip, 
what happens? They get arrested, they get thrown in jail, and for 4 
years, 4 years ago, we as a nation put our stamp of approval on all of 
this when we passed NAFTA.
  Today, supporters of NAFTA want to expand NAFTA to new countries. 
Many of us believe that before we expand it, we have to fix it.
  So the question we face as a nation today is simply this: Are we 
willing to use our political power and leverage to raise the standards 
of other countries to our level, or are we simply going to let 
ourselves get caught in the game of, how low can you go? Are we willing 
to argue that human rights and labor rights must be a part of any 
agreement?
  In the fight to stop this spiral to the lowest common denominator, 
labor unions must play a role.

                              {time}  1330

  Multinational corporations have a global strategy. The labor movement 
needs to have a global strategy as well. Labor needs to link arms 
abroad and fight for common values.
  We saw what happened in Poland. Labor support for Lech Walesa helped 
create worldwide support for the Solidarity movement.
  We saw it happen in France. Not long ago, metalworkers from Germany 
joined arm in arm with their Parisian counterparts to protest unfair 
demands of a company based in France. Together, they forced the company 
to back down.
  To have leverage against corporations in other nations, you need to 
have strong countervailing forces in those nations to back them up with 
collective ideas that matter. That is why it is so important that 
organizing in other nations is vital.
  I would like to see American labor do the same thing in Mexico, 
Indonesia, and countries throughout the Third World. American labor 
needs to lend their experience and expertise to help workers in Mexico 
organize. I would like to see union members from America and Europe 
work together to raise the wages in the Third World, and we should not 
be afraid to go after corporations who want to sell in our markets, but 
exploit people on our own border.
  Let me give a couple examples. In Pakistan, the labor movement, 
working with religious leaders and community leaders, helped expose 
corporations who forced kids to stitch soccer balls. These kids were 6, 
7, 8 years of age, working huge, long days and weeks in factories.
  In India, we now have a rug mark that says ``This carpet was not made 
with slave labor.''
  Of course, who could forget Kathy Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart. When 
labor helped expose the sweatshop conditions Wal-Mart was forcing some 
people to work in, it started a national crusade that shamed Wal-Mart 
into changing its ways.
  So if we can bring public pressure to bear across international 
lines, it will and can have an effect. The more we can hold one 
corporation accountable, the more we will make others wary.
  But let us also understand this: There is a difference between the 
real threats of the global economy and the perceived threats of the global
economy. What do we mean by that? For all the very real dangers, the 
global economy directly affects just one-fourth of all the jobs in 
America today. Beth Shulman's article in last December's American 
Prospect points out that 77 percent of the jobs in America are out of 
reach of global competition.
  There are more people today working in dental offices than are 
working in the auto industry.
  There are more people working in Laundromats than are working in 
steel-mills.
  Columbia Hospital system employs more people than Chrysler.
  McDonald's employs more people than General Motors.
  Yet, the model we have based our image on is the same manufacturing 
model we focused on 50 years ago. By doing so, not only are we skewing 
the reality of the global economy, we are playing into the fears that 
the threat of the global economy is greater than it really is. That, in 
turn, creates a sense of powerlessness across the entire economy.
  Not long ago I heard a story about a company in Ohio that announced 
it was moving to Mexico. As a result, both hospital workers and 
McDonald's employees were all worried about losing their jobs. But the 
hospital and the restaurant were not going anywhere, but the very fear 
of moving convinced those workers not to push for salary increases.
  While we need to address the very real problems about jobs going 
overseas, we need to be realistic about its scope. There are enough 
barriers to organizing unions today. The power of corporations, legal 
barriers, technology, a shrinking job base, are all tremendous hurdles 
to overcome. Labor needs new tactics to meet these challenges.
  Labor needs to reach beyond its traditional constituencies, it needs 
to put more resources into organizing, it needs to reach out to younger 
people, like the thousands of college students who participated in 
union summer last year.
  If a majority of workers are fed up and decide they want a union and 
they sign a union card, they should have a union. They should not be 
forced to jump through hoops for 8 years to carry out their 
constitutional rights. In Canada, they have what is called a card 
check. It works this way. If a majority of workers sign a card for a 
union, that is it; they get a union. For too long the National Labor 
Relations Board has been used to making it as difficult as possible to 
organize new members. But that cannot stop us.
  Labor needs to enlist the whole community: the churches and religious 
leaders, community activists, responsible local businesses. Everyone 
needs to involve themselves and understand the link between workplace 
issues and community issues.
  I believe labor needs to take on more struggles that help it create 
and recapture this moral authority that I am talking about. That is why 
I believe this weekend's march with the strawberry workers in 
California is so important.
  The strawberry industry is a $650 million industry. It is run by some 
of the largest corporations in America, including Monsanto, where 
senior executives get paid million-dollar salaries. Yet, the people 
that are working in the fields get paid $8,000 a year, often working 12 
hours a day with no job security, no pension, no health care, often no 
clean drinking water, no decent bathroom facilities, working every day 
with dangerous pesticides and dangerous toxins, and most of them have 
not seen a raise in 10 years.
  Last year they had elections across strawberry country. Workers voted 
overwhelmingly to be represented by the United Farm Workers. But 
instead of giving workers a raise, do you know how the corporations 
responded? Some of them fired people, some of them skipped town, some 
of them even plowed under their own fields. Of course, most of them 
immediately brought in consultants.
  But the strawberry workers of the United Farm Workers have not given 
up. This weekend, tens of thousands of men and women from all over the 
country will be traveling to California. I will be joining them. We are 
going to March arm in arm with the United Farm Workers, and we are not 
going to give up until strawberry workers have the right and dignity 
they deserve.
  So, the more that labor can regain moral authority in places like the 
strawberry fields of California, the more it will help them in the 
steel-mills of Pennsylvania and the hospital wards of Texas.
  We may be living in a profound time, a time of profound insecurity, 
and we may be living in an age when multinational corporations are 
running amuck, when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing 
and people seem to be more disconnected every single day. But I do not 
think for a second that it means they are disinterested. People do not 
want to see hard work go unrewarded. They do not want to be treated 
like garbage.
  They do not want to read stories about layoffs and downsizing. They 
do not want to see a $776 million payoff. They do not want to read 
stories about Asian sweatshops. They do not want to be left alone to 
face 5 billion other people in the world economy.
  They want to believe again. They want to believe that things can get 
better. They want to have control over their lives. They want to be 
part of a community. They want to believe we have larger purposes as a 
nation. That is what the union movement in this country is all about.
  It is not unions who have rigged the game, Mr. Speaker. It is unions 
who have fought for decency for working families and a greater vision 
of democracy. They have fought against the billions of dollars of 
corporate special interests that is arrayed against them every single 
day. They have fought against the multinational corporations that know 
no allegiance to any country and move jobs overseas at the drop of a 
hat. They have fought against runaway corporate greed and its 
destructive effects on our communities and our values. Always they have 
fought against the odds. They have organized when guns and nightsticks 
have tried to beat them down. They have pooled their resources to get 
out the truth, even as corporations have outspent them by hundreds of 
thousands of dollars.
  Unions have shown average Americans that they have real power, that 
they can have a larger voice, and that working together, people can 
make a difference. If we have the courage to try new things, to believe 
in old values, and to work together to make it happen, I believe unions 
can lead America into the 21st century. More than that, we will 
reconnect people to this democracy. We will make them feel a part of 
something larger than themselves, and we will give them a reason to 
believe again. That was worth fighting for 50 years ago, and it is 
worth fighting for again today.
  So in conclusion, I say that I look forward to engaging in this 
debate about unions and people coming together, banding together for 
decent profits, decent wages, and decent working conditions; because it 
was the working men and women who stood up and fought those who would 
perpetrate greed, who got us the 8-hour day, the 40-hour work week, 
wage increases, Medicare, Social Security, educational benefits, 
protection at the work site. That movement helped create the most 
powerful middle class in the history of this planet. It is that 
movement, again, that will be needed to counter the forces that are 
trying to drive peoples' wages and drive peoples' benefits and drive 
peoples' dignity and respect into the ground.
  So let us have this debate. I am ready. My colleagues are ready. We 
are willing to debate the Speaker and his colleagues on the issue of 
working men and women and their right to collective bargaining. It is a 
right that was put together, culminating 30 years of prosperity unknown 
in the history of this planet. We believe, again, that the movement 
that brought us these rights is ready to take its appointed place in 
American society.

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