[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.

[[Page S284]]

  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

[[Page S285]]

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.

                          ____________________