[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 17 (Thursday, February 2, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S283-S285]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICAN BUSINESSES
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, over the last several months, I put my
staff on a little mission. I asked them to identify manufacturing
companies in my home State of Illinois that have not only weathered
this recession but are doing well and are hiring. I wanted to meet with
these companies and find out why the recession has treated them
differently, particularly when it comes to manufacturing jobs. I have
been pleasantly surprised at how many businesses I have found to be in
that condition in my State. Not to understate our unemployment rate or
the impact of the recession on many businesses, the fact is there are
some that have not only weathered the storm but are doing quite well,
and they represent a variety of different goods that they manufacture.
The heartening and encouraging news is that we are hearing more often
that companies have decided to resource their jobs back to the United
States. In his State of the Union Address, the President spoke of one
such company, Master Lock, located in Milwaukee, WI, which he noted has
now announced that they think America is the best place to make
products and do business. That is a good trend we want to encourage.
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We know we have lost a goodly share of manufacturing jobs over the
last several years. In the year 2000, more than 17 million Americans
were employed in manufacturing. Ten years later, the number had fallen
to 11.5 million--from 17 million to 11.5 million. More than 300 of
those jobs were lost in my home State of Illinois in that decade, from
2000 to 2010.
But American manufacturing is growing again. One of the real good
news stories is Chrysler. I am sure the Presiding Officer remembers the
controversy when General Motors and Chrysler faced bankruptcy and the
possibility of literally going out of business. In my lifetime, other
car manufacturers have gone out of business. The President decided--and
rightly so--that we could not afford to lose those jobs. So we
engineered a loan with General Motors and Chrysler, premised on their
changing the way they did business.
Many critics said that was the wrong thing to do, the capitalist
purists who were saying: No, no, these things happen. Companies go
away, and new companies emerge; General Motors and Chrysler should be
allowed to go gently into the night.
President Obama disagreed. Many of us disagreed. And he put a
downpayment on the future of the American automobile industry which has
paid off handsomely. Just this last week, the major auto
manufacturers--Ford, Chrysler--announced recordbreaking profits. They
have restructured. They are selling a better product, they are doing it
in a better way, and they are now competitive. The American people are
buying their products. General Motors has come back strong.
Just by way of comparison, I recently read that if you look at the
total number of employees in certain companies, it gives you an idea of
why some have more value overall to the economy than others. We all
know Facebook. We hear about it all the time. When somebody asks to
take my picture, I laughingly say: Do you promise you will put it on
Facebook? And they laugh out loud because that is exactly what they are
going to do, instantaneously. Facebook has about 3,000 employees in
America. We all know Google. We use it every day--I do--to find
information and to access different sites. Google has about 30,000
employees in the United States. How many employees are there in General
Motors' direct employment? A hundred thousand.
When the President said that we need to invest in the automobile
industry, it was a decision based on the need for good-paying jobs
right here in America. Well, I can tell you, when it comes to Chrysler,
it was an investment that paid off for my home State of Illinois. This
week, Chrysler is announcing that it will be adding 1,600 manufacturing
jobs at its plant in Belvidere, IL. I was encouraged when I met with
the CEO of Chrysler and he said it is one of the most efficient and
cost-productive plants in all of Chrysler Corporation, and it should be
expanded.
In November, Caterpillar, the largest exporter in my State, the
largest manufacturer, announced a $600 million investment in its plants
in Decatur and Peoria, IL, and they are going to bring back hundreds of
jobs to our area.
American companies are beginning to realize that manufacturing
products right here in the United States can be profitable again. That
is good news for Illinois and good news for America. Manufacturing was
the backbone of the American economy for decades. We may never see it
return to its heyday, but we should take steps to strengthen it.
In the State of the Union Address, President Obama laid out a number
of key steps to boost manufacturing and ensure that more products have
these three key words: ``Made in America.''
The President's proposal builds on legislation that I introduced
personally in 2010 to reduce the tax benefits that companies can claim
when they close factories here in the United States. Hard as it may be
to believe, the Tax Code rewards and compensates those companies that
decide to close down manufacturing in the United States and move it
overseas. The Tax Code currently allows companies moving operations
overseas to the deduct their moving expenses and reduce their taxes in
the United States as a result. It is a direct subsidy to move a job
overseas. It is just common sense that taxpayers should not be helping
companies cover the cost of outsourcing jobs.
The President is also taking important steps to encourage
insourcing--when companies close operations overseas and move jobs back
to the United States. Specifically, the President is calling for a 20-
percent income tax credit for the expenses of moving operations back
into the United States to help companies bring jobs home.
He also proposed a new credit for investments that help finance
projects in communities that have suffered a major job loss event, and
every one of our States has one. It might be the steel mill in
Hennepin, IL, the tool manufacturers in Sterling-Rock Falls, the
appliance factory in Galesburg, or the farm equipment factory in
Canton, IL. Too many communities have suffered dramatic layoffs when
plants have shut down over the last several decades. We have all seen
the stories. We have all met the people who have seen their lives
changed dramatically because of those decisions. Without new
investment, many of these communities will continue to struggle.
The tide is starting to turn for American manufacturing, but we can
do more to make growth in that sector stronger and faster. We may never
return to the forties and fifties, but there are some things we can do.
One of the things I found interesting as I visited these plants that
were trying to hire people in manufacturing was the obstacles they were
running into.
We have a State with a lot of unemployment, over 8 percent. In some
parts of the State, it is over 10 percent. You wonder how in the world
with so many people out of work there would be good-paying jobs
unfilled. It turns out, I found, as I traveled around the State, those
in manufacturing who want to hire new employees run into three
obstacles.
The first obstacle is that people applying for a job don't have the
skills necessary to work in manufacturing today. Those who have not
seen it personally may not know what manufacturing looks like today. It
is much different than the image of 30, 40 years ago. The plants
themselves are much cleaner operations, and most of them are computer
driven. Unlike the old days of steam and dirt in every direction, those
aren't the manufacturing plants of today, in many instances, across
America.
What they are looking for in applicants for industrial maintenance,
for example, which is a major area of need as baby boomers age out and
retire--industrial maintenance requires that the applicant have more
than a passing knowledge of mathematics and computers. If they don't,
frankly, they are walking into an environment where they cannot be of
much help.
In some areas--in Danville, for example--a local manufacturer is
teaming up with the Danville Community College to take those who don't
possess the right math and computer skills and train them at the
expense of the company so they can go to work. The same is true in my
State over and over again. The community college links up with the
manufacturing concern and starts training employees so they will be
ready to fill the jobs, at the expense of the company.
The second obstacle is a psychological one which I hadn't thought
about. It turns out that many parents, when the son says they are
hiring at such-and-such a business, will say: Wait a minute. I didn't
want you to grow up working in a factory like your dad. I wanted you to
have a job where you wear a coat and tie. Didn't you go to community
college? You ought to do better than that. It turns out there is a
prejudice against working in factories, even though, as I said, they
are much different and the compensation is much better than some other
alternatives. They are having open houses at many factories in Illinois
so families and high school counselors can see what they look like and
see that they are not the image they might have in their mind.
The third obstacle is one that is very practical. Before an employer
would put an employee in charge of a multimillion-dollar, computer-
driven manufacturing process, they would want to make sure the employee
is not only skilled but sober. That means drug tests. Many of these
would-be applicants for manufacturing jobs fail drug tests time and
again. Why? They have
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grown up in a generation that says marijuana doesn't count, and they
are wrong. Or they are engaged in other drugs. They just cannot expect
to be taken seriously as a job applicant if they cannot pass a drug
test. They will not get through the front door.
Those three things--basic skill and training, attitudes of families
toward jobs in manufacturing, and the drug tests--have turned out to be
the three obstacles that have been raised time and again all across
Illinois. But we can overcome each one of them, and we should. We can
fill these jobs, good American jobs, with skilled set people who can
produce for this country for many years to come.
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