[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 19]
[House]
[Page 27339]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                   NAVY'S HANDLING OF VESSEL REPAIRS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Guam (Mr. Underwood) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. UNDERWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I rise to bring up an issue which I 
brought up earlier last week and which I continue to fight, and that is 
that the U.S. Navy has done it again.
  The day before yesterday I was informed that yet another U.S. naval 
vessel, the USNS Kiluea, is going to be sent to a South Korean shipyard 
for scheduled maintenance. The USNS Kiluea is one of several U.S. 
flagged Navy vessels that transport ammunition to our surface fleet, 
and recently the USNS was stationed with U.S. forces operating in and 
around the peacekeeping mission in East Timor.
  Several weeks ago, the Navy and the Military Sealift Command issued a 
Far East request for proposal seeking bids for ship repair work on the 
USNS Kiluea.

                              {time}  1815

  To the surprise of no one, the bid that won was a foreign shipyard 
because it can dramatically underbid U.S. shipyards. And so once again, 
Mr. Speaker, the U.S. Navy and MSC is spending U.S. tax dollars to 
repair American naval vessels with foreign workers in a foreign land.
  Incredibly, it seems that the U.S. military is bent on spending 
precious tax dollars in Japan, Korea, or Singapore to keep their 
shipyards operating and their workers employed but will not lift a hand 
for U.S. workers. That is the outrageous facts. Many of these vessels 
are entitled U.S. Navy ships.
  Indeed, at the rate that the Navy is sending these jobs overseas, if 
Congress is not too careful and does not pay attention to this process, 
these Navy ships are going to have to be redesignated as Republic of 
Korea Navy ships.
  Check this out. The Military Sealift Command, in violation of an 
amendment to Title 10, which I introduced, requires that U.S. naval 
vessels home-ported in the United States must do their repair work, 
their normal repair work, not emergency work, in U.S. shipyards.
  My amendment included Guam under this, and Guam is part of the United 
States and the workers are U.S. citizens. And what my amendment asked 
was that the Navy put those ships that are under their control and are 
home-ported, and many of these ships operate right out of Guam, they 
steam right by a U.S. shipyard operated by Americans, staffed by 
Americans, and they bid out the work, and these very ships go right 
past those workers up to a shipyard in South Korea.
  This is more than about dollars and cents. This is about jobs. The 
fact is that foreign shipyards can always beat U.S. shipyards in terms 
of price, for several reasons.
  First, foreign shipyards are in most cases subsidized. Second, 
foreign shipyards do not pay their workers decent wages. Third, foreign 
shipyards do not have to comply with health and safety work laws and 
environments. Finally, some shipyards are in foreign countries that 
have had their currencies devalued compared to the dollar. For all 
these reasons, foreign shipyards are cheaper than American. But they 
are certainly not any better.
  What we are up against is the Navy's insistence that, through a 
series of ways of redefining where these ships are home-ported, they 
have been able to escape the full application and the spirit and intent 
of Title 10, which is to take ships that are home-ported in American 
ports, make sure that their work is done in American shipyards, their 
regular work.
  What the Navy has done through the MSC is redefine these so that they 
can compete these out and give the work to foreign shipyards.
  Our readiness continues to suffer on this. The internal Navy waiver 
process continues to be issued unabated. I am calling upon many of my 
colleagues here in the House, and some have already signed letters, but 
I am calling through a ``dear colleague'' letter to protest this effort 
directly to Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen.
  This practice is wrong, it is harmful to the national security of the 
Nation, and it certainly hurts American workers.

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