[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 153 (Wednesday, November 7, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H7900-H7907]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       WORKING FAMILIES PLAY VITAL ROLE IN WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shuster). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am disturbed by the fact that in this war 
against terrorism, which we all recognize is going to be a long-term 
war, we are not recognizing that working families in this struggle 
against terrorism are very important. Working families in the struggle 
against terrorism have a vital role to play. It is important that we 
all recognize that role that working families play.
  I am disturbed because of the treatment that I see working families 
receiving. Since September 11, we have not behaved well toward working 
families. They are a vital component of our long-term mobilization to 
make certain that this Nation is never again subjected to the kind of 
attack that took place on September 11. They are a vital component of a 
war for the Nation, a war for the whole of civilization, really, 
because the kind of fanatics and zealots who attacked the World Trade 
Center are that kind of threat. So working families should be respected 
and considered a vital part of whatever we are going to do in the 
future.

[[Page H7901]]

  I am also concerned about the fact that some immigrants who are 
Americans, working families and happen to be immigrants, are being 
unnecessarily harassed. Particularly in my congressional district there 
is a large contingent of Pakistani immigrants, Pakistani Americans. 
They have been subjected to all kinds of harassment by the INS and the 
FBI. In an overzealous attempt to demonstrate that they are working 
hard, the INS and the FBI have arrested large numbers of people, they 
say more than a thousand across the Nation, in the metropolitan area it 
is about 250; and I know from firsthand contact that a large number of 
these people are innocent Pakistanis. It is ironic that the one Muslim 
nation that has gone the farthest out to join us in the fight against 
terrorism, taken a great deal of risk as a nation, is Pakistan.
  Why are Pakistani Americans being lumped into the whole threat to 
America that it is perceived immigrants represent? Why not recognize 
that the President of Pakistan is coming to this country this weekend. 
He will be at the United Nations. He is going to talk to President 
Bush. Pakistan again has not reneged on their offer to make some air 
base space available. They are way out there with us. I think that to 
subject Pakistani Americans to unnecessary harassment and intimidation, 
some which resulted in the death of one Pakistani man in a jerry-built 
detention center in New Jersey, large numbers of people were being 
detained by the INS in a facility that was being run by the local 
county, the county jail, and the man had a heart attack and died. There 
are large numbers of others who are in detention right now whose names 
we cannot get. There are an unusually large number of women also who 
are being detained, Pakistani women. These are all people who are 
basically working-class people. I am emphasizing this because no 
wealthy Pakistanis would be involved in this. No wealthy immigrants are 
going to be subjected to this, either.
  It is very interesting that those who talk about immigration never 
talk about the fact that in our immigration laws, we actually have 
provisions which encourage rich, wealthy immigrants to come in. We have 
incentives for wealthy immigrants. We put them at the front of the 
line. The assumption is made in this present situation where we are 
unnecessarily harassing immigrants, the assumption is made, I guess, 
that only the poor immigrants are a threat.
  Why the assumption is made, I do not know, because Osama bin Laden is 
a rich man. Osama bin Laden comes from a very rich class of Saudi 
Arabians. There are many Saudi Arabians and other people from the rich 
Arab world that are in this country who never get harassed and never 
have been harassed since September 11, I assure you. There are many who 
have contracts with lobbying firms here in Washington. There are some 
really very famous celebrities and ex-government officials who work in 
consultant firms for these same rich people. They are not immigrants, 
or in some cases immigrants. The children of these rich people are here 
on visas all the time. They are not subjected to this. It is another 
case of the mentality too much in America is a mentality which is 
weighed in a direction which makes working-class families suspect or 
second class.
  I do not want to fall into the trap of fomenting a class war. The 
people who really believe in a class war are quick to accuse liberals 
and Democrats and progressives of wanting to start a class war. The 
class war is not even a war. The people who are in control in our 
country who have the greatest part of the wealth and the power, they 
are so overwhelming in their power that they dominate the working 
class. It is not a war. It is just a domination, the way they push the 
interests of the working families around.

  There is no better example of that than what has occurred since 
September 11. Consider the fact that we passed a bill to bail out the 
airline industry, $5 billion in cash for them to divide up among 
themselves because of losses we say they suffered as a result of being 
grounded by the Federal Government after the September 11 attack. They 
were able to play with that, and they are going to get another $15 
billion in loans. That is for the airline industry, the executives, et 
cetera. At the same time many of us pleaded that at least the airline 
employees should be taken care of in the same legislation, because, 
after all, when you grounded the airline industry, the planes, you also 
took away the employment of the people who work on those planes either 
in the base or in flight or the supporting services at the airports.
  So why not have a relief package for them? Because of that traumatic 
economic blow to the airlines, they were already beginning to lay off 
large numbers of workers. So we said, the workers who are laid off, let 
us provide for them. We got from the Republican majority an insistent 
no, an ideological no. There was a lot of talk about ideologues. A 
blunt no, we will see about them later. We even got some half-hearted 
promise that next week. Well, next week has not come yet. There has 
been no particular special relief for the airline industry employees. 
We are now moving through the preparation of an economic stimulus 
package where the same ideologues are insisting that we should not have 
any great amount of relief for the unemployed in general. The 
unemployed people are at the very bottom who are suffering greatly from 
this economic slump that was given a great boost downward. It was 
pushed downward and made more serious by the September 11 attack.
  We ought to stop and consider what our long-term mission is here. We 
have had forced upon us the need to consider what is the United States 
of America all about. Before September 11, we were the most powerful 
Nation in the world.

                              {time}  1945

  We are the most powerful nation that ever existed on the face of the 
Earth. We were prosperous, very smug, and anybody who said we needed to 
stop and think about our relationship with the rest of the world and 
what our mission is as a nation and how our mission as a nation is 
important, because in defining that mission, we not only protect 
ourselves and defend ourselves and guarantee our children and our 
grandchildren will enjoy the same kind of liberty, prosperity and 
comfort that we enjoy. That is the dream I think every person has.
  I am a grandfather, and I look at my grandchildren and say I want 
them to have a world as good as the world I am, and, if possible, 
better. So we want a better world. We cannot do that by acting in 
isolation as the United States of America.
  A lot of us understood that before. Since September 11, most 
Americans are beginning to hear from the leadership that that is an 
impossibility, starting with the leadership in the White House. 
Appropriately, President Bush moved to establish a coalition, what is 
called a coalition, but the coalition is to deal with terrorism. The 
coalition spirit should be a permanent spirit.
  In defending ourselves against terrorism, we are coming to grips with 
what our Nation is all about, what civilization is all about. Because 
the people who have perpetrated these terrorist acts are striking at 
the very jugular vein of our Nation and our civilization.
  Our long-term mission has to be to understand that we stand for 
certain values, and those values are what bring about our enemies. The 
people who perpetrated the terrorist acts on September 11 do not like 
those values.
  We should not cry about it or spend undue time worrying about whether 
we are liked or not. The question is, why are we not liked, who does 
not like us, and what do we think of the people who do not like us?
  People hate our values, and we should not get into the trap of one 
religion being set up against another. Certainly Osama bin Laden wants 
to make it a conflict between Christianity and Islam. A lot of other 
people would enjoy having the real issue hidden under crosses and past 
history of crusades, et cetera. But we are not a country that accepts 
religion as a basis for our being. We are not a country that adopts one 
religion.
  We have a certain value system, and the value system is really what 
upsets our enemies most. Whether we were Christian or Jewish or any 
other religion, they still do not like the value systems that are 
defined and set forth and promulgated by the Declaration of 
Independence and the Constitution.

[[Page H7902]]

  Probably more so than the Constitution, the Declaration of 
Independence defines what America is all about. It is not a legal 
definition, because the Declaration of Independence, the preamble, is 
not a legal matter. You do not go to court on that. The Constitution is 
a legal document that we have a lot of wrangling about, back and forth 
in the court.
  But Thomas Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal and 
are endowed by certain inalienable rights, and among those are life, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is the core of the spirit of what 
this Nation is all about, the core of our democracy and what it is all 
about, the core of what we carry about throughout the world, the core 
of what the world is responding to.
  Anybody who says we are more hated in the world than we are liked in 
the world, I challenge them right away. I think we are more imitated, 
admired, and people would duplicate our system, if they could, ordinary 
people.
  We have leaders out there, fanatics, zealots, who would like to see 
this belief in the equality of all men ended. And we should stop saying 
all men, but say all humans, because we clearly believe that women 
should be equal to men. That upsets a large number of people throughout 
the world. Equality of men and equality of women.
  We do not subscribe to a system which says that you have got some 
people up here who can be ayatollahs or chiefs or kings or sultans or 
potentates that have a right to trample on the people underneath them, 
that the lives of the people at the bottom of the economic ladder are 
not as good as the lives of people at the top; that they do not deserve 
the same system of justice, the opportunity to improve themselves; that 
they do not deserve an education.
  The spirit of America is what the enemies of America hate. That 
spirit is summed up in the statement about life, liberty and the 
pursuit of happiness, and all human beings are created equal.
  It does not matter what happens in our foreign policy today, tomorrow 
or the next day. If you do not back away from believing all men and 
women are created equal and we continue to have a democratic system, 
and we are going to have decisions made as fair as possible and keep 
trying to perfect it to make it real, we are going to offend large 
numbers of people throughout the world. Large numbers of zealots and 
fanatics are always going to be attacking us.

  Do not worry about whether they like us or not. We have a mission to 
try to go throughout the world and make people understand how important 
this is.
  We have succeeded greatly in expanding democracy in the 20th century. 
Just stop and think about two very sophisticated, powerful nations with 
influence stretching over large areas of the world who became definite 
democracies. Without question, Japan and Germany, after the defeat in 
World War II, became democracies. Whatever else they are, nobody 
challenges; nobody would question the fact that Germany is a great 
democracy now and will be tomorrow. There is no likelihood that they 
are going to sink into fascism, totalitarianism. Germany is clearly a 
democracy. We accomplished that.
  The transformation of Germany, some people said, well, we do not 
engage in nation-building. That is bad. Call it what you want. We did 
not exactly nation-build in Germany. They had a nation, very rigid 
rules and social strata. All kinds of things are happening there, and 
it is still happening in many cases.
  It is just as in the case of Japan. We did not knock down traditions 
in Japan. We did not turn around their religion. We did not turn around 
their deeply entrenched practices with respect to marriage and a number 
of other things. But Japan is a democracy. Germany is a democracy. Two 
great nations with a lot of influence are moving forward as 
democracies.
  The Soviet Union, which most of us felt in our lifetime would never 
be called a democracy, is struggling and moving and has operated for a 
number of years now, 10 years, as a democracy, a struggling democracy. 
A huge nation, but a very large sphere of influence.
  Democracy. Democracy moves on. We should not back away from that 
mission.
  India, whatever problems India may have internally, India is a 
democracy. The untouchables in India probably feel like blacks felt in 
America 20 or 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things to be 
done about the way untouchables are treated in certain regions. But 
India is basically committed to democratic rule. They have gone through 
a lot of tribulations and travails, social and political travails, but 
they have not yielded to any temptation to lapse back into something 
other than democracy.
  So our way of life, our mission in the world, is to perpetrate that 
democracy. That may mean we need to go to war when it is necessary, 
when we are attacked. I must say that people who say that what is 
happening in Afghanistan is similar to what happened in Vietnam are 
starting out with the wrong premise. The Vietnamese never attacked us. 
Whatever you may think about the war in Vietnam, we were never 
attacked. They did not perpetrate 5,000 casualties on us in the first 
day of the war.
  A war was declared upon us. Even the Japanese at Pearl Harbor did not 
hit as many casualties, and they did not hit the mainland of America. 
So war was declared upon us via an attack on the mainland of America. 
As a nation, there was no choice but to accept the challenge and go to 
war. The nature of that war and how we conduct it is something we can 
debate about, but war was necessary.
  We are at war physically. Militarily we are at war. But we also are 
at war for the minds, and we understand the minds of the world, the 
minds of human beings all over the world are part of this war and 
effort.
  So we must, as we conduct this war and understand our long-term 
mission, understand that working families are very vital in this 
struggle against terrorism. How working families are treated, how they 
are included, how they are allowed to participate, how we show concern 
for their problems is vital to the effort to win the war against 
terrorism and to win the war for a democratic world, where all men and 
women are seen as equal, where life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness are the values of the people who are in charge of nations.
  Barbarians are anyone choosing to define themselves as being against 
all this, who are our enemies. The barbarians are against equality, 
equal rights for all men and women. They are against life, liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness as being a basic set of rights. They define 
themselves. We do not have to wrangle about their way of life or their 
religion, whatever. If you are against equality for all people, if you 
are against the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, 
you are our enemy. You define yourself, and we are committed.
  We must maintain a mission to deal with that enemy. As long as the 
enemy believes that way and does not attack us, certainly we will not 
attack them. It is a battle of words. It is a battle of ideas. It is a 
battle of moral concepts. We would like to see it return to just a 
battle of words, ideas and moral concepts.
  But since it is a hot war, a military war, engagement is taking 
place, working families and the sons and daughters of working families 
are very much involved in that war. If you look at percentages, I 
assure you the percentage of the people who are running the operation, 
whether it is the women in the rear, in the ships and the planning of 
the logistics or whatever, or the men who are in the Special Forces 
teams that landed already or are getting ready to land, you are going 
to find that large percentages of those people, overwhelming 
percentages, are from working families.
  How dare we ignore the needs of working families when, if you did not 
understand how vitally important they are before, you certainly must 
acknowledge now how vitally important they are? Because this is nothing 
new. In all the wars that have ever been fought, there are always 
working families, people on the bottom who make the greatest 
sacrifices. Their sons and daughters have been the cannon fodder in 
every war since the Revolutionary War onwards.
  Therefore, if we are wise and we want to continue the progress of our 
Nation

[[Page H7903]]

and fulfill the vision of the Declaration of Independence, working 
families should be treated well. They are on the battlefields, wherever 
they are. They sacrifice, they take the great risks. They are on the 
battlefield domestically. They are needed very much as we try to shore 
up our home security.
  There are a lot of problems that we have just because we do not have 
the personnel, quality personnel, to fill jobs. I have spoken about 
this before, but, since then, just last week, the Government Office of 
Personnel launched a major campaign to get young people to come into 
the government. We are trying to entice people in to fill the 
positions.
  There are investigative positions, there are analyst positions, there 
are positions in the computer areas, and there are, of course, 
translators. I talked about that before. There is a great need for 
translators, people who can translate from Arabic, from Farsi, just as 
an example.
  So we have a great need that cannot be filled by educating just the 
middle class and elite children. I have talked about this many times. 
Our public education system, which is an American invention, public 
education, which sets forth the credo that all children should be 
educated, it is one of the great contributions to civilization.
  It is also one of the reasons that we are greatest Nation in the 
world. Step by step, when we need it, the brain power to go forward, 
the brain power has been there. Thomas Jefferson understood that we had 
to get away from educating people just to speak Greek and Latin and 
deal with philosophy and religion. They have to be educated in the arts 
of farming, engineering, et cetera. So he was the creator of the model 
for the land grant colleges which came later.
  Of course, those land grant colleges established in every State were 
fed by a system of public education, which, in State by State, over the 
years, has been very much imperfect, and there are many problems. The 
problems did not just begin a few decades ago. We have always had 
problems.
  But we must rush now to solve those problems by making certain that 
working class families, children of working class families, get a 
first-class education, because in addition to them being our first 
defenders on the battlefields of the world when there is a military 
conflict, they are also the ones that have to replenish the human 
resources that we need to run the CIA, to run the FBI, to run the INS, 
to take care of a very complex society.

                              {time}  2000

  Even the airplanes and the aircraft carriers and the tanks and all of 
the weapons require educated people to operate them at this point. So 
it is imperative that we recognize the vital role of working families 
and we end what has happened this year in this country, this House of 
Representatives. What has happened this year is that since September 11 
it has come out more than ever before that there is great contempt for 
people in the working class. Working-class families are being treated 
with great contempt. The majority of Republicans show again and again 
their great contempt for the working families of America. Minimum wage, 
they refuse to talk about it at all. We have not increased the minimum 
wage. We have not each even had a chance to discuss it.
  Mr. Speaker, I am making a plea to my colleagues that we end the 
contempt, the class contempt and the class hostility that is reflected 
in the way we have treated working-class families in this Congress. We 
refuse to discuss minimum wage, so people are mired at the very bottom 
and have had no movement for the last 2 years. No discussion of it at 
all.
  What has happened since September 11? There is an article that 
appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday, yesterday, which I think is 
a very thorough analysis in a very compact way of what has happened to 
working families. The article in The New York Times, Tuesday, November 
6 is entitled: ``A Tax Hit Low Pay Jobs the Hardest. Many of the 
unemployed were in the service industry.'' It is by Leslie Eaton and 
Edward Wyatt. ``The terrorists,'' and I read a quote from the article, 
``The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center may have been 
trying to crush American capitalism and its masses of the universe on 
Wall Street, but the economic impact of the attack is felling a very 
different group of people: cooks, cab drivers, sales clerks, and 
seamstresses. Workers in traditionally low pay industries like 
restaurants and hotels, retailing and transportation, have been hit 
hard in the fallout from September 11, according to a new analysis from 
the New York State Department of Labor. A report released yesterday by 
the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute forecasts that almost 80,000 
people will have lost their jobs by the end of the year, and that 60 
percent of these positions paid an average of $23,000 a year.''
  That is far below the citywide average salary of roughly $58,000 in 
New York City. New York City has a slightly higher salary scale and 
standard of living. If we want to know who I am defining as working 
families, I am not going to get into trying to deal with expert 
definitions, but let us just say anybody who has a family and they are 
making less than $50,000 a year can consider themselves in a working-
family situation. The working families income-wise. There are other 
features. People have to get up every day and go to work. There are 
some people who may get $50,000 a year from their investments in the 
stock market or various interest-bearing accounts or real estate, but 
the people have to get up and go to work every day and are making less 
than $50,000 a year are clearly people who belong to working families; 
and there are an overwhelming majority of people in America who fall 
into this category.
  Continuing to read from the article that appeared in the New York 
Times on November 6: ``The spillover effect hit the retail and service 
industries very hard in New York City, said James Parrott, the chief 
economist for the institute, and those tend to be lower wage jobs. A 
sudden decline in these jobs marks a sea change in the economy since 
September 11. Earlier this year while the job market was softening, the 
losses were concentrated among white collar workers like dot-com 
programmers, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Now they are 
concentrated among people like Kim Daily. A single mother of two, Ms. 
Daily worked her way up from a $6 an hour job picking up room service 
trays to a $15 an hour job stocking mini bars at the World Trade Center 
Marriott. When the hotel was destroyed on September 11, so was her job. 
She has not been able to find another job. It is not for lack of 
trying. She stood in line for 4 hours outside a city-sponsored job 
fair, but never even made it to the door. She has been talking to a 
union, but the only position available so far was so tip-dependent, 
that she wondered if it would cover her $700-a-month rent. A job bank 
had only a few hotel positions, and none of them paid anywhere near the 
$25,000 that she earned at the Marriott last year. I do not want to go 
for less money, she said. But a changed job market raises huge 
challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of 
families have moved off the welfare rolls.''
  Here is a welfare recipient who got a job for $6 an hour. She worked 
up to $15 an hour, and $15 an hour comes out to $25,000 a year in her 
pay, so we are certainly not talking about wealthy, well-to-do people. 
We are talking about people who are working ever day, but getting very 
low pay.
  Continuing the article: ``The changing job market raises huge 
challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of 
families have moved off the welfare rolls. The most successful of these 
former welfare recipients, as well as many newcomers to the country, 
found jobs at the hotels and restaurants, as cleaners of office 
buildings, and as messengers in lower Manhattan. Now that the economy 
has exploded along with the World Trade Center, their prospects of 
staying in the world of work have diminished, said David R. Jones, the 
President of the Community Service Society of New York, which has been 
helping workers who lost their jobs after September 11. His group is 
recommending a government-financed jobs program, he said. Otherwise we 
will have people sitting on stoops, getting a little check and doing 
nothing, he said.''
  That is David Jones of the Community Service Society talking. He is 
more optimistic than I am. Given welfare reform, there are a lot of 
these

[[Page H7904]]

people who are very needy, desperately needy, who will never get a 
welfare check. They will never be sitting on a stoop doing nothing, 
because the way the system operates now, you can almost starve. Your 
family can go completely mad before you get any help.
  Continuing the article: ``How many New Yorkers are unemployed is 
unclear. In a government survey taken in the week of September 11, 
which anyone who worked at all was counted as employed, 223,100 people 
in New York were looking for work. That was an increase of almost 
20,000 people in a month. The unemployment rate hit 6.3 percent. The 
October survey will not be released for several weeks, but its results 
are included in Federal figures which were released on Friday. Those 
Federal figures show that a surge in national unemployment rose by half 
a percentage point to 5.4 percent,'' and we have all been reading about 
the fact that that surge to 5.4 percent represents the highest 
unemployment for the last 20 years. The unemployment rate is higher now 
than it has been in 20 years.
  ``Unemployment insurance covers only about a third of unemployed 
workers. The number of people applying for benefits in the city have 
soared. Last month, an average of 12,745 people a week had applied. A 
year ago, that figure was merely 5,616 a week. A special program, 
Disaster Unemployment Assistance, is supposed to help those who are not 
eligible for unemployment insurance because they work part-time or they 
were self-employed before. They are not eligible. But only 2,350 people 
are now getting those benefits.''
  In other words, out of the 12,745, only 2,350 are getting those 
special disaster unemployment benefits in New York State.
  ``Almost 25,000 people told the New York State Department of Labor 
that they lost their jobs because of the Trade Center disaster. The 
analysis said that the first 22,000 of these claims found that about 16 
percent worked at bars and restaurants, 14 percent worked in hotels, 
and 5 percent worked in air transportation. Only 4 percent at Wall 
Street brokerage firms.'' And many of them have been relocated to some 
other place. They have fared the best.
  ``The largest group of people, 21 percent, worked in a category 
called business services. Many of these were temporary workers like 
Lisa Mendes, a single mother who lost her job as an accounting clerk on 
September 12. In years past when one temporary job ended, she could 
pick and choose among the offerings of the agencies. Now there is just 
nothing there. Ms. Mendes is typical of the unemployed in another way: 
she lives in Brooklyn. The Labor Department analysis said that almost 
26 percent of the people who said they were jobless because of the twin 
towers collapsed lived in Brooklyn.''
  Brooklyn happens to be my home borough. The 11th Congressional 
District is located in the center of Brooklyn.
  ``Twenty-four percent of the people lived in Queens, 12 percent lived 
in the Bronx, and just 18 percent live in Manhattan where most of the 
jobs are located. Ms. Mendes, who is from Jamaica, is lucky of the many 
of the unemployed because she speaks English and she can use a 
computer. The Consortium for Worker Education, which runs a special 
program for people unemployed because of the disaster, and they have 
already counseled 3,200 people, they have 5,000 jobs in that special 
bank,'' for people who can handle that kind of need, I mean are 
familiar with computers. ``Most of them are back office jobs, data 
entry jobs, word processing jobs, administrative assistance, said Sal 
Rosen, the Associate Director of that group.
  ``Hotel and restaurant employment has been devastated by the 
destruction of the trade center and the steep drop in tourism that 
followed. Most restaurants are not unionized, but Local 100 of the 
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which represents about 
6,000 restaurant workers, say that 10 percent of its membership lost 
jobs immediately after September 11. About 200 of those, 600 have since 
found work, but not necessarily in restaurants.
  ``John Haynes has a short-term job at the Immigrant Workers 
Assistance Alliance helping undocumented workers. Until September 11, 
he cooked meals on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center for the 
250 employees of Windows on the World. He said he earned $408 a week 
before taxes, about $25,400, and he lives in a public housing unit in 
the Bronx.'' Mr. Haynes is of course quite happy that he escaped death, 
first of all.
  ``The tourism and travel drought has hit many businesses in Queens, 
according to a new report by the Center for an Urban Future, a public 
policy group. Airline workers, freight forwarders, truckers and 
limousine drivers are all hurting.'' And on and on it goes.
  They also included in the same article a chart which breaks out 10 
occupations that were most affected by events of September 11, 
unemployed after the attack. The occupation: waiters and waitresses. 
The estimated layoffs were 4,225 as a result of September 11 events. 
The average hourly wage of those waitresses and workers was $7.08 an 
hour. Cleaning and maintenance workers about 3,365, have lost their 
jobs. Their average wage was $14.90 an hour.

                              {time}  2015

  Sales representatives (retail), 2,843. Their average wage was $9.15 
an hour; food preparation, 2,284, and they made $8.90 an hour; 
cashiers, 2,282 and $7.36 an hour they make; housekeeping workers, 
1,840, and $13.42 they make; food preparation and fast food service, 
1,718 have been laid off, and $7.09 was their average wage; general 
managers and top executives, 1,367 have lost their jobs. Their average 
wage per hour was $51.34; sales supervisors, 1,183, and $22.42 an hour; 
service supervisors, about 1,070 have lost their jobs, and they made 
$16.46.
  This chart is for ten occupations most affected by the events of 
September 11. It appears in the New York Times Tuesday, November 6.
  I include for the Record the entire article.
  The article referred to is as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Nov. 6, 2001]

                  Attacks Hit Low-Pay Jobs The Hardest


            Many of the Unemployed Were in Service Industry

                   (By Leslie Eaton and Edward Wyatt)

       The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center may have 
     been trying to crush American capitalism and its masters of 
     the universe on Wall Street. But the economic impact of the 
     attack is felling a very different group of people: cooks, 
     cabdrivers, sales clerks and seamstresses.
       Workers in traditionally low-wage industries, like 
     restaurants and hotels, retailing and transportation, have 
     been hit hard in the fallout from Sept. 11, according to a 
     new analysis from the New York State Department of Labor.
       And a report released yesterday by the labor-backed Fiscal 
     Policy Institute forecasts that almost 80,000 people will 
     have lost their jobs by the end of the year and that 60 
     percent of these positions paid an average of $23,000 a year. 
     That is far below the citywide average salary of roughly 
     $58,000.
       ``The spillover effects hit the retail and service 
     industries very hard in New York City,'' said James Parrott, 
     the chief economist for the institute. ``And those tend to be 
     lower-wage jobs.''
       The sudden decline in these jobs marks a sea change in the 
     economy since Sept. 11. Earlier this year, while the job 
     market was softening, the losses were concentrated among 
     white-collar workers like dot-com programmers, stockbrokers 
     and advertising executives.
       Now, they are concentrated among people like Kim Daily. A 
     single mother of two, Ms. Daily worked her way up from a $6-
     an-hour-job picking up room-service trays to a $15-an-hour 
     job stocking minibars at the World Trade Center Marriott.
       When the hotel was destroyed on Sept. 11, so was her job. 
     And she has not been able to find another one.
       It is not for lack of trying; she stood in line for four 
     hours outside a city-sponsored job fair but never even made 
     it in the door. She has been talking to her union, but the 
     only position available so far was so tip-dependent that she 
     worried it would not cover her $700-a-month rent. A job bank 
     had only a few hotel positions, and none paid anywhere near 
     the $25,000 she earned at the Marriott last year.
       ``I don't want to go for less money,'' she said.
       The changed job market raises huge challenges for the city 
     at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved 
     off the welfare rolls. The most successful of these former 
     welfare recipients, as well as many newcomers to this 
     country, found jobs at hotels and restaurants, as cleaners at 
     office buildings and as messengers in Lower Manhattan.
       ``Now that the economy has exploded along with the World 
     Trade Center, their prospects of staying in the world of work 
     have diminished,'' said David R. Jones, president of the 
     Community Service Society of New York, which has been helping 
     workers who lost their jobs after Sept. 11.

[[Page H7905]]

       His group is recommending a government-financed jobs 
     program, he said. ``Otherwise, we'll have people sitting on 
     stoops, getting a little check and doing nothing,'' he said.
       How many New Yorkers are unemployed is unclear. In a 
     governmental survey taken in the week of Sept. 11, in which 
     anymore who worked at all was counted as employed, 223,100 
     people in New York City were looking for work (after 
     adjustments for seasonal factors). That was an increase of 
     almost 20,000 people in a month. The unemployment rate hit 
     6.3 percent.
       The October survey will not be released for several weeks, 
     but its results are included in federal figures, released 
     Friday, that showed a surge in national unemployment, which 
     rose by half a percentage point, to 5.4 percent. Unemployment 
     insurance covers only about a third of unemployed workers, 
     but the number of people applying for benefits in the city 
     was has soared. In the last month, an average of 12,745 
     people a week has applied; a year ago, that figure was 5,616.
       A special program, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, is 
     supposed to help those who are not eligible for unemployment 
     insurance (usually because they worked part time or were 
     self-employed). But only 2,350 people are now getting those 
     benefits.
       Almost 25,000 people told the New York State Department of 
     Labor that they lost their jobs because of the trade center 
     disaster. An analysis of the first 22,000 of those claims 
     found that about 16 percent worked at bars and restaurants, 
     14 percent worked at hotels and 5 percent worked in air 
     transportation. Only 4 percent worked at Wall Street 
     brokerage firms (many of which simply relocated workers to 
     Midtown or New Jersey).
       The largest group of people--21 percent--worked in a 
     category called business services. Many of them were 
     temporary workers, like Lisa Mendes, a single mother who lost 
     her job as an accounting clerk on Sept. 12. In years past, 
     when one temporary job ended, she could pick and choose among 
     the offerings at the agencies. Now, ``there's just nothing 
     there,'' she said. ``It's scary.''
       Ms. Mendes is typical of the unemployed in another way--she 
     lives in Brooklyn. The Labor Department analysis found that 
     almost 26 percent of those who said they were jobless because 
     of the twin towers collapse live in Brooklyn; 24 percent live 
     in Queens, and 12 percent live in the Bronx. Just 18 percent 
     live in Manhattan.
       But Ms. Mendes, who is from Jamaica, is luckier than many 
     of the unemployed because she speaks English and can use a 
     computer. The Consortium for Worker Education, which runs a 
     special program for people unemployed because of the disaster 
     (and has already counseled more than 3,200 of them) has 5,000 
     jobs in its special job bank.
       ``Most of them are back-office jobs, data entry, word 
     processing, administrative assistants,'' said Saul Rosen, 
     associate executive director of the group.
       Hotel and restaurant employment has been devastated by the 
     destruction of the trade center and the steep drop in tourism 
     that followed. Most restaurants are not unionized, but Local 
     100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, 
     which represents about 6,000 restaurant workers, says that 10 
     percent of its membership lost jobs immediately after Sept. 
     11. About 200 of those 600 have since found work, but not 
     necessarily restaurant work.
       John Haynes has a short-term job at the Immigrant Workers 
     Assistance Alliance, helping undocumented workers. Until 
     Sept. 11, he cooked meals on the 106th floor of the World 
     Trade Center for the 250 employees of Windows on the World. 
     He said he earned $488.80 a week before taxes, or about 
     $25,400 a year, and he lives in public housing in the Bronx.
       He does not think he will be able to go back into 
     restaurant work, he says. ``They are not hiring right now,'' 
     he said. ``So I'm going to go for job training, either in 
     computers or photo imaging.''
       The tourist and travel drought has hit many businesses in 
     Queens, according to a new report by the Center for an Urban 
     Future, a public policy group. Airline workers, freight 
     forwarders, truckers and limousine drivers are all hurting.
       Listen to Greg Buttle, who operates valet parking lots at 
     the three major New York area airports: You park at these 
     lots and workers will shuttle you to and from the terminal 
     for about $13 a day plus tax. (They will also wash your car, 
     change the oil, rotate or replace the tires, even pick up 
     your dry cleaning.) Before, he normally had more than 150 
     cars in the lots; now, there are about 50, he said.
       Mr. Buttle said he employed 45 people before Sept. 11; now 
     he employs 30. ``I tried to make sure that the part-timers 
     who have come in most recently are the first ones to go,'' he 
     said. ``But some of our employees have worked for us for 
     eight or nine years.''
       For more evidence of the spillover effect, look at 
     Chinatown. Business has plunged at many of the more than 200 
     sewing shops below Houston Street and at least 20 went out of 
     business in October, said May Chen, a vice president of 
     Unite, the garment workers' union. At least a thousand of her 
     10,000 members have lost their jobs as stores and clothing 
     companies have canceled orders. Others are working reduced 
     hours.
       Their job prospects are not good. ``Because of the language 
     barrier, sewing is about the only skill they have,'' said 
     Susan Cowell, another union official.
       Unite also represents workers at commercial laundries; 
     because of the declines at many restaurants, about 600 of 
     these workers have also been laid off.
       With the public's attention riveted to the sad stories of 
     the dead and the heroism of the rescuers, some workers fear 
     that their plights will be ignored.
       ``No one wants to hear our stories,'' said Asmat M. Ali, a 
     former captain at Windows on the World. ``About a busboy or 
     the dishwasher making $250 a week and raising three kids in 
     an apartment in the Bronx or Brooklyn. But 80 percent of the 
     people who worked in the World Trade Center fell in that 
     category.''

  Mr. Speaker, I think this is a landmark article which clearly sets 
forth the basic thesis of my discussion: Working families in the 
struggle against terrorism are suffering greatly already in New York 
City.
  The domino effect of the World Trade Center catastrophe and the 
declining economy goes right across the whole country. Workers in New 
York City are not the only workers suffering. The pattern that I have 
just set forth applies right across the country in the big cities, and 
certainly places where tourism was important, places where the service 
industries are important, they are all suffering equally. These are the 
people who are vital to our winning the struggle against terrorism, to 
the saving of our civilization. They are suffering in a very direct 
way. We are not responding in this Congress to that suffering.
  As I said before, we approved a bill for the airline industries, and 
at that time we would not approve a bill for the airline employees who 
were being laid off in large numbers. We said we would do it next week. 
It is 3 weeks later now, and we still have not done it. There seems to 
be no haste at all.
  The airline employees, those who are unemployed, have been lumped 
with the other unemployed now. What does the Republican majority 
propose for the other people who are unemployed? Piddling, very tiny 
amounts of money were included in the stimulus package that has already 
passed this House of Representatives.
  We passed the stimulus package in the House without any significant 
aid for the unemployed and for working families. The emphasis of the 
bill that passed the House by the Republican leadership, the Republican 
majority's bill, which passed by a two-vote margin, that bill places 
great emphasis on more tax cuts.
  We are going to have more tax cuts because the ideologues say the tax 
cuts are necessary for investment. The ideologues say when we have tax 
cuts, people invest, the investment creates jobs, and it trickles down 
to people on the bottom.
  But sometimes tax cuts are not invested, they are just hoarded. 
Sometimes tax cuts lead to people having money which they invest in 
other parts of the world where they get a higher return on their 
investment. Taking care of big business does not automatically lead to 
a benefit for people on the bottom, and that has been shown again and 
again.
  The best way to help poor people, we know from social services 
practices, nonprofit services practices, the best way to help people is 
to put money in their hands. Unemployed people need money. Unemployed 
people, people who have working families, cannot save the money. They 
need the money now. They will spend the money now. It will turn over in 
our economy.
  We recognize that the engine of capitalism is consumerism. Consumers 
make our economy go. Why do we hesitate, then, to make provisions for 
people who are the number one consumers? The working families are our 
number one consumers. It does not make sense.
  Ideologues, people trapped in a vision of the world which says, no, 
government spending are always bad, tax cuts are always good, they have 
their heads in the sand in a dangerous way.
  So we are stalled. Fortunately, yesterday the other body unveiled an 
economic stimulus package that sets up a situation where we will have 
another opportunity maybe in the conference to fight for the 
unemployed.
  The other body's plan was drafted in close consultation with labor 
leaders who helped persuade key Senators to gear the package heavily to 
helping workers who have lost their jobs, but some elements sought by 
labor were trimmed back in the final hours, even though the plan is 
still far superior to the one that came through the House.

[[Page H7906]]

  Democrats will be able to get the bill through the closely divided 
Senate Finance Committee. Tomorrow it is expected, but no Republican 
has signed onto the plan. It is even doubtful it could pass on the 
Senate floor unless it is agreed that they would not have a filibuster.
  The House and Senate bills are almost mirror opposites of each other. 
The House bill devotes about 75 percent of its $99 billion first-year 
cost to business and individual tax cuts, while only about one-quarter 
of the $90 billion Senate bill would reduce tax revenue.
  The Senate plan also includes $20 billion for additional spending on 
infrastructure and security. AFL President John Sweeney said that 
``Congress took care of companies'' with airline rescue legislation, 
and ``they continued to lay off workers. Weeks have gone by and no 
action was taken and the unemployment numbers rise. It's about time 
they deal with the unfairness here.''
  One of the tax provisions, allowing companies to speed up 
depreciation of newly-purchased assets, would cost States about $2 
billion in revenue. With State budgets already under pressure, that 
could lead to layoffs of State workers, county workers, city workers.
  We have contempt for the needs of the people on the very bottom at a 
time when it is pretty clear that they have to play a vital role in our 
war on terrorism.

  I hope the message goes out and all of the Members of Congress who 
are listening would understand the need to communicate with their 
working families about the unfairness of this, and about the fact that 
this Congress is being managed in a way in which it is almost 
impossible to get up enough momentum to confront the party in control.
  We spend a lot of time in recess. We spend a lot of time working back 
in the district. There is a plot, a scheme to minimize the amount of 
time spent on the floor of this House and people speaking in a way 
which might be picked up by the general public, and certainly working 
families.
  So the message has to be gotten out there somehow that working 
families are being treated unfairly. Working families have a vital role 
to play in the struggle against terrorism, and they are not being 
recognized for their full worth. We demand that there be some definite 
changes made.
  On another area, working families are being subjected to conditions 
which are going to create more unnecessary victims. We have a situation 
where we opened this Congress this year with a repeal of the ergonomics 
standards by OSHA. There was joy in the majority, great joy and 
celebration in taking away labor standards and standards to assist the 
safety of working people, working families, members who have to go out 
and work every day in the area of ergonomics.
  There was a set of standards that would have helped make the 
workplace far safer, less dangerous, and less debilitating for key 
people. On all measures that relate to worker safety, we have 
tremendous opposition from the Republican majority. I know because I am 
the ranking member of the Subcommittee on WorkForce Protections. It is 
my job to deal with workforce protections, and we have bill after bill 
and effort after effort to cut down on the safety or the government's 
protection of the safety of workers.
  Now this monster has raised its ugly head at ground zero in New York. 
At ground zero, we have a situation where rescue workers and other 
people in the area are not being protected properly, and we are going 
to have victims created unnecessarily.
  Because of the contempt for workers, the hostility towards working 
families, nobody is paying attention to the need for protective gear. 
Recently, according to an article that appeared in the Daily News on 
October 26, ``A Federal agency has slammed the city for not taking 
steps to protect rescue workers from injuries immediately after the 
World Trade Center catastrophe. In a sharply worded report, consultants 
for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences said nearly 
1,000 injuries, ranging from blisters and nausea to severe burns and 
fractures, could have been prevented if the city had made sure workers 
had basic safety training and adequate equipment such as hard hats, and 
respirators.''
  The report was dealing with very basic, elementary kinds of things, 
but beyond that, the report gets into the discussion of toxic chemicals 
and metals: `` `Toxic chemicals and metals are being released into the 
environment around lower Manhattan by the collapse of the World Trade 
Center towers and by the fires that are still burning at ground zero,' 
according to internal government reports. Dioxins, PCBs, benzene, lead, 
and chromium are among the toxic substances detected in the air and 
soil around the World Trade Center site by Environmental Protection 
Agency equipment, sometimes at levels far exceeding Federal levels, the 
documents show.'' This is a report in the Daily News also on October 
26, an article by Juan Gonzalez.
  ``EPA monitoring devices have also found considerable contaminants in 
the Hudson River and in the water and sediment, especially after it 
rains. Six weeks after the World Trade Center attack, benzene, a 
colorless liquid that evaporates quickly and can cause leukemia, bone 
marrow damage, and other diseases in long-term exposure, continues to 
be released into the air in plumes from the still burning fires at 
relatively high levels.''
  On and on it goes to talk about the fact that the protective gear 
needed is not there. The highest level of benzene recorded was on 
October 11, 58 times higher than OSHA's permissible exposure limit. 
Other kinds of extremes have also occurred.
  Workers' health and sometimes their lives are at stake in this kind 
of situation because later on these kinds of exposures lead to 
debilitating diseases and people die.
  We have a situation that has now been revealed concerning the workers 
who worked on the spill at EXXON, the EXXON Valdez oil spill in 1989, 
when an oil tanker ran aground and spilled tremendous amounts of oil. 
The count was 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals. 
We know what the animal count was, but only now are we beginning to 
understand that when 11 million gallons of oil were spilled and people 
from all over the country went out to clean it up, they became victims, 
also.
  No one talks about the workers who stood in the brown foam 18 hours a 
day, who came back to their sleeping barges with oil matted in their 
hair, ate sandwiches speckled with oil, steered boats through a brown, 
hydrocarbon haze that looked like the smog from hell, and after the 
summer, some found themselves with oil traces in their lungs, in their 
blood cells, in the fatty tissue of their buttocks.
  They got treated for headaches, nausea, chemical burns, and breathing 
problems and went home, but some never got well.
  The story appears in another newspaper that this goes on and on, and 
many years later workers are suffering dramatically, and some people 
are dying as a result of not paying attention to the health of the 
workers.
  Another way the workers are being treated in a hostile and 
contemptuous manner relates to the contracting process at ground zero. 
We started off on the wrong foot. There was an article in the New York 
Times on October 19 which talks about the fact that they were employing 
people who were not being paid. Day laborers at ground zero say they 
are not being paid. The story as it goes here shows that illegal 
immigrants were brought in by a contractor from outside the city and 
they were not even bothering to pay the people who were working at very 
low wages.
  The treatment of workers in this situation amounts to a lockout of 
legitimate workers who live in New York. New York has a high 
unemployment rate. A few minutes ago, I said it is presently at 6.3 
percent for adults. Yet, most of these workers were brought in from 
outside the city.
  Day laborers are frequently illegal immigrants who are promised 
payments in cash. They have no form of employment contracts. They know 
their employer only through a crew leader who hires them on a street 
corner.
  Officials with a cleaning company, in this case Milrose Services, 
Incorporated, of Freeport New York, the usual racket in which certain 
people in city government contract with people outside the city, and 
these officials of this particular company say they are not responsible 
for hiring and paying the laborers. They have the contract, they are 
not responsible.

[[Page H7907]]

                              {time}  2030

  The company hired a subcontractor to do that. What is unusual here is 
the setting. Ground zero has just been destroyed in an act which is 
attributed to illegal immigrants or undesirable immigrants. They are 
hunting all over the country for undesirable immigrants, but the 
contractor brings in illegal immigrants to do part of the cleaning work 
at the World Trade Center, and of course, the people are so crooked 
they do not even bother to pay the workers, and they make a mistake, 
and it becomes a matter in the paper.
  One of the workers was named Cecilia Ramirez, but what is important 
here, and I would like to submit this entire article, is a 
documentation of the utter contempt they have for a working class that 
would go outside on a critical matter like cleanup work around ground 
zero and get illegal immigrants and bring them into New York City while 
other people are looking for work and these kinds of jobs.
  I will include this article that appeared in the New York Times on 
October 19th in the Record.

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 19, 2001]

        Day Laborers at Ground Zero Say They Are Not Being Paid

                          (By Somini Sengupta)

       The state attorney general's office is investigating 
     complaints that day laborers hired to clear debris from 
     office buildings surrounding the site of the World Trade 
     Center have not been paid, some of them for up to two weeks 
     of work.
       The complaints here are hardly unusual. Day laborers are 
     frequently illegal immigrants who are promised payment in 
     cash. They have no formal employment contracts, and they know 
     their employer only through a crew leader who hires them on a 
     street corner.
       Officials with the cleaning company in this case, Milro 
     Services Inc., of Freeport, N.Y., say they are not 
     responsible for hiring and paying laborers; the company hired 
     a subcontractor to do that. (Late yesterday afternoon, the 
     subcontractor said she was making arrangements to pay the 
     workers.)
       What is unusual here is the setting. In this case, the day 
     laborers are at the center of the mammoth cleanup effort in 
     Lower Manhattan. By 8 a.m. each morning, they are lined up, 
     100 deep, on the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street for a 
     day's work. Escorted past barricades by police officers, they 
     clear shards of glass, wipe soot off desks and sweep floors 
     covered with ash and debris.
       They are promised $60 for an 8 hour shift, $90 if they work 
     12 hours, and the buildings they clean include the offices of 
     several city and federal agencies. But in interviews at the 
     hiring site this week, several laborers, including some men 
     and women freshly unemployed from shops and delis near the 
     trade center, said they had not seen a dime for their work--
     some for a week, some for two.
       One man, Gonzalo Carmona, opened his datebook and pointed 
     to his nine days of work, starting on Oct. 1; by his 
     calculations, he was owed $780. A woman, Cecilia Linares, 
     said she had worked for seven days straight; when she asked 
     about pay, the woman who hired her, whom she said she knew 
     only by her first name, Lumi, told her, ``Tomorrow, tomorrow, 
     tomorrow.''
       Early Wednesday morning, Ms. Linares showed up again and 
     looked, in vain, for the woman.
       The complaints first surfaced when an organizer with the 
     New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health went to 
     the hiring line to talk to workers about safety precautions; 
     he heard an earful about how they were not being paid.
       Yesterday morning, lawyers from the state attorney 
     general's office came and the workers lodged their 
     complaints.
       ``They gave us very specific information about where they 
     worked, what they were promised, what they were paid, what 
     they weren't paid,'' said Patricia Smith, the assistant 
     attoney general in charge of the agency's labor bureau, whose 
     offices are around the corner from the hiring site. ``We've 
     talked to the employer, we are investigating and, hopefully, 
     we'll be able to resolve it.''
       Officials with Milro Services said yesterday that they were 
     surprised and dismayed to learn of the charges. But they said 
     hiring and paying the day laborers was not the company's 
     responsibility, but that of a supervisor, Lumi Morel, who was 
     acting as a subcontractor.
       ``I don't like that this is happening, if it is 
     happening,'' said Tom Milici, the vice president of Milro. 
     But, he added, ``that's out of my hands.''
       Late yesterday afternoon, Ms. Morel, reached by telephone, 
     said she had been delayed in paying the workers because of 
     paperwork. She said that she owed money to about 80 workers, 
     and that she planned to pay them by today.

  Continuing in the same vein, suddenly beyond September 11 we had the 
crisis of anthrax. Anthrax is a very deadly substance, as we all know. 
I need not waste the time here to repeat what the Centers for Disease 
Control and the numerous press conferences over the last 2 weeks have 
told us about anthrax. We vacated the House of Representatives because 
of the anthrax possibilities, the scare. There is a Senate building 
which still remains vacant, the Hart Building, because of the anthrax 
scare.
  What happened when it was discovered in the post office where working 
people work? What happened when it was clear that there was a danger to 
workers? We have two deaths, postal workers, two deaths that I consider 
to be totally unnecessary. If we had acted faster, if information had 
moved faster, if the people in charge of combating the anthrax problem 
had moved faster, with more purpose, these two men would not be dead, 
in my opinion.
  I think triage was practiced. The intention was focused on the 
important people. We have Congressmen, Senators on Capitol Hill, and 
given the fact that we were not prepared, we have limited people who 
know how to handle this problem, which is most unfortunate and a little 
unforgivable because anthrax has been a clearly recognized problem 
since the Gulf War. They even, at one point, ordered all members of the 
Army to be vaccinated against anthrax.
  If we became worried about anthrax during the Gulf War and we have 
had a situation where at one point all the members of the Army were 
ordered to be vaccinated against anthrax, why is there so little 
expertise in the country when an anthrax outbreak occurs in Washington, 
so little expertise that we do not have enough to take care of the 
situation at the post office, at the same time we take care of the 
situation on the Hill in Senate and House buildings? They did not move 
fast enough. Information did not flow fast enough.
  Our hospital system has been under pressure for the last 20 years and 
certainly will see no relief because of the ideologues in this Congress 
who insist that we continue to cut local facilities, hospital 
facilities unnecessarily. Of course, in the Washington, D.C., area they 
closed down D.C. General Hospital.
  We watched the spectacle of two postmen who went to a hospital and 
because the hospital was so badly informed, because of their own 
pressures, they were turned away, and when they went back the next day, 
they were already dying. Here is a triage setup, and here is a setup 
which flows out of the inadequacy of our basic health system.
  We should have a health system which is not just prepared to combat 
terrorism, but one that makes certain everybody gets equal and rapid 
treatment. It did not happen. Joseph P. Curseen is dead as a result. 
Thomas Lee Morris is dead as a result.
  Then we have the spectacle of the D.C. General Hospital being used as 
a major headquarters for the process of dispensing the antibiotic and 
giving out information. D.C. General Hospital has been closed. The same 
economic forces, the same pitch on our health care facilities that has 
gone on throughout the country has forced the closure of D.C. General 
Hospital. But because there was no other place, the emergency center 
had to be set up at the D.C. General Hospital. The working class had to 
do with a closed hospital, a jerry-built situation to take care of a 
major problem.
  Joseph P. Curseen is dead. Thomas Lee Morris is dead. They were 
postal workers at the bottom of the heap, and we are not taking care of 
our working families when we allow that kind of system to take place. 
When decisions are made, triage decisions, some people are more 
important than others.
  It is important we go forward with a health care system that serves 
everybody. That health care system would certainly be ready for any 
kind of bioterrorism in the future, and workers' families would be 
treated in the same manner as any other families. There would be no 
priority set for anybody. Everyone would have the same service.
  I conclude by saying that working families in the struggle against 
terrorism are as important as any other component. They may be the most 
important component in our struggle against terrorism.

                          ____________________