[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11045-11047]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         SHIPPING JOBS OVERSEAS

  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I have filed an amendment to the 
underlying legislation. I know there is discussion about who might get 
an amendment. A lot have been filed. There is negotiation about which 
amendments might be made pending and debated. I hope this amendment 
will be. It has had a long and tortured history. It is an amendment I 
offered when the now-President, Barack Obama, was a Senator, and he 
strongly supported it. In fact, during his campaign, he talked a lot 
about this subject. It is the issue of shutting down a perverse tax 
incentive that exists in this country for shipping jobs overseas.
  We provide tax incentives if you are willing to shut down your 
factory, fire your workers, and move your product elsewhere; we say we 
will give you a tax break. That is unbelievable. We have had four 
recorded votes in the Senate. I have lost all of them.
  As it seems, many people believe we ought to continue this tax 
incentive. I think we ought to continue to try to get a majority in the 
Senate to agree with the proposition that, at long last, we have to 
stop subsidizing shipping American jobs overseas.
  On this chart is a description of the ``cool, refreshing taste of 
mint dipped in dark chocolate.'' The ad, by Hershey's, is for their 
York Peppermint Patty, and it says, ``the cool, refreshing taste of 
mint dipped in dark chocolate will take you miles away.'' Little did we 
know that it will actually take

[[Page 11046]]

you to Mexico, because that is where they began to make these mint 
patties. They used to be American made, all-American mint patties. But 
now they have gone to Mexico. In fact, 260 jobs were moved to 
Monterrey, Mexico, as part of a long-term Hershey's strategy. So that 
is mint patties. I suppose they are not as important as, perhaps, 
automobiles, or jobs that are making sophisticated high-tech equipment. 
But still and all it is mint patties.
  Hallmark Cards, an American company, privately held in Kansas City, 
MO, with a 100-year history in our country. It was founded by a high 
school dropout who started this company in 1910 with shoe box 
postcards. He sold a shoe box full of postcards, while living at the 
YMCA in Kansas City. This became a fabulously successful card company. 
In fact, all of us have used Hallmark cards to send a message to 
someone. When they say ``if you care enough to send the very best,'' 
they don't exactly now say where to send it. If you are going to send 
it where they are made, they have gone to China. What kind of a card do 
you send to a Hallmark employee whose job is now in China, where they 
are making Hallmark cards? So that is mints and cards--probably, as I 
say, not as important as making automobiles. But those jobs have also 
left.
  Making refrigerators. Whirlpool has been involved, as well, in moving 
jobs. I have talked about this previously. Whirlpool refrigerators 
moved jobs all over the world from Evansville, IN. They moved work to a 
factory in Mexico, even though the company accepted a $19.3 million 
grant by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop smart appliances. 
Those smart appliances left to go south. So Whirlpool appliances have 
gone to Mexico, and 1,100 U.S. jobs moved to Mexico.
  This is a picture of a woman named Natalie Ford, 42 years old, who 
worked at a Whirlpool appliance plant in Evansville for 19 years. She 
learned that her job was moving to Mexico in November of 2009. That is 
a photograph of Natalie when she discovered that her 19-year investment 
in this company was over.
  It was like a punch in the gut, she said.
  I notice every month we focus on this issue: How many jobs have we 
created in this country? How many have we lost? How many people are 
filing for unemployment insurance?
  I consider the job thing like a bathtub. You have a faucet that puts 
jobs in, creating jobs in this economy, and then you have a drain, and 
it is wide open. We are talking about how many jobs we create next 
month, and the drain is wide open. They are going to China.
  For example, I will show a couple of photographs of where some of 
these jobs go.
  This is the home of a Salvadoran worker who makes NFL jerseys. They 
sell for $80 apiece in the United States of America--NFL football 
jerseys. Here is the home of the worker. I have held hearing after 
hearing about these issues.
  This is a Reebok NFL jersey made by a Chinese-owned sweatshop in El 
Salvador. Again, that merges all the best of what we know is wrong with 
the issue of the migration of jobs--a Chinese-owned sweatshop in El 
Salvador making NFL jerseys for Reebok.
  I have held hearings, and I have had people who work in El Salvador 
testify at hearings. I will not spend much time on this because I have 
shown it on the Senate floor so many times. This is Radio Flyer, a 
little red wagon made in Chicago. This a 110-year-old company, made by 
a wonderful immigrant who loved radios and loved airplanes, built a 
little red wagon that every kid in this country has ridden in. What did 
they name the little red wagon? Radio Flyer, because he liked airplanes 
and radios. We all understand what Radio Flyer means. It means a little 
red wagon that pulls kids. But they are gone. They are not made in 
Illinois any longer. They are all gone to China. Maybe that is OK if 
one doesn't care where these things are made and where the jobs are.
  Finally, Huffy bicycles. I know I have described this company 
forever. But those who worked there were paid $11 an hour, and they all 
lost their jobs--all of them. There is still a Huffy bicycle. All the 
jobs went to China. They then declared bankruptcy, and all the pension 
plans of all the people fired in the United States making Huffy 
bicycles, made for decades, were taken over by the Federal Government 
because the company declared bankruptcy. Now the Chinese own the brand 
and they make these bikes in China.
  I know who makes them. They are made by Chinese workers who make 30, 
40, 50, 60 cents an hour tops. They work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours 
a day. That is what is happening.
  I have not described the automobiles and what is happening, or the 
airplanes parts for that matter. The list is very substantial. I have 
spoken about it at great length.
  I described that Fruit of the Loom underwear left America. Maybe 
underwear is more important or less important than chocolate mints or 
Hallmark Cards. I don't know. Fruit of the Loom is the company that 
used to have the dancing grapes, the red grapes and green grapes people 
would dress up as. I don't know what kind of people dress up in grape 
outfits. They seem to have fun. They advertised Fruit of the Loom 
underwear.
  All of a sudden, there is not any underwear made in the United States 
by Fruit of the Loom. Do you know there is not one pair of Levis made 
in the United States? Not one. Talk about the all-American company, 
buying your first pair of Levis, buying a pair of Levis for school, 
there is not one pair of Levis made in the United States. It has all 
migrated, all gone.
  Here is the proposition. We stand idly by while month after month 
these jobs are leaving. I described previously on the floor about an 
airplane trip I took about 4 or 5 months ago. I sat next to a man who 
was wearing a gym outfit, sweat pants, and so on. He was pretty 
comfortable on that airplane.
  I said: Where are you headed?
  He said: I am heading to Asia. I am going to be on a long trip, 25, 
30 hours, so I decided to dress down.
  He was wearing one of those sweat outfits.
  I said: Why are you going to Asia?
  He said: My company wants to move the jobs and have the products that 
we buy from the suppliers made in Singapore, Thailand, and China. So I 
am going on a trip to Singapore, Thailand, and China to take a look at 
where we can move these jobs to these countries.
  I thought, here is a guy sitting on a plane, wearing a sweat suit, 
and he is going someplace and there are perhaps thousands of workers 
whose job is going to be traded away because somebody decided: We can 
make those kinds of products less expensively if we can find people who 
will work for 30 cents an hour.
  Perversely, it is not just that. We have also decided, if they will 
do that--just shut the door, fire the workers, chain the factory gate--
we will give them a big, fat tax break.
  If you have two companies across the street from each other--both 
making the same product, both doing the same thing, both employing the 
same number of people--and one says they are moving to China, fires the 
workers, locks the gate, and the other says they are staying here, 
guess what the difference is the next year. If they make the same 
amount of money, then the company that stays here pays higher taxes and 
the company that leaves pays lower taxes. That is the perverse, insane 
tax incentive that exists in our Tax Code.
  The amendment I have filed deals with the issue of what is called 
deferral--deferring the obligation to have to pay taxes to a later date 
when you repatriate the income. I do not eliminate deferral altogether. 
I eliminate deferral when a company leaves our country to go abroad and 
produce a product to sell back into our marketplace. If that is your 
motive, then you ought not get a tax break from this government or this 
country. It makes no sense for us to continue this behavior.
  As I have indicated, I have required votes on this issue. We have had 
debates and I required votes. There are people in this Chamber who cast 
a vote against an amendment such as this and

[[Page 11047]]

then rush off the floor and they will even be the ones who talk about 
how they support American jobs.
  Don't tell me you support an American job if you support a tax 
incentive that moves our jobs overseas. Just don't tell me because it 
is not true.
  We will again next month, right on the edge of a knife, be wondering 
what is happening to this economy by the evidence of unemployment 
numbers or the evidence of new jobs created. As I said, it is fine, and 
I work with all the people here. In fact, the bill that is on the floor 
is the so-called extender bill, a jobs bill, an attempt to invest in 
new jobs in this country, incentivize new jobs in this country. To the 
extent we create new jobs in this country and at the same time 
incentivize jobs running out of the country, that is just boneheaded. 
We cannot keep doing that.
  At some point, the Congress has to decide, based on some reservoir of 
common sense, that we are not going to provide incentives for people 
who move American jobs elsewhere. We have trouble enough competing with 
labor conditions that exist, as I have described in those charts, with 
a number of circumstances that exist in the hiring of workers in China 
who you can work 7 days a week, 12, 14 hours a day and, by the way, you 
can house them and sleep them in a cinder-block room that holds 12 
people. That is what is happening. We have trouble enough competing 
with that, let alone giving a big tax incentive to somebody who says: 
That is where I want to do my business.
  I am just saying, I filed an amendment. I know there is a dance going 
on here to decide who gets votes and who doesn't. If we are worried 
about this economy and worried about trying to incentivize American 
jobs, we have to vote on this amendment and we ought to pass it with a 
resounding vote.
  Does anybody here care about whether ``Made in America'' once again 
is something we can put as a sticker on a product? Do we care at all? 
Or is it just that we do not need to make anything? It seems to me 
America's future is to understand and learn from our past that we are a 
strong, world-class economy only when we have a world-class 
manufacturing base. We will not long remain a world-class economy if we 
decide it does not matter what our manufacturing base is.
  In the previous 9 years ending in 2009, we lost more than 5 million 
jobs in the manufacturing base of people who make things. I am talking 
about people who go to work and take a shower after work. They are on a 
factory floor and making real products, ``Made in America.'' That has 
been the reservoir and source of a lot of good jobs that pay well with 
good benefits. It always has been. That is what largely expanded the 
middle class in this country.
  Now there is some notion that it does not matter somehow; this is 
just a world economy and it does not matter. Get on your airplane, 
search around the planet. Where can you land that plane, open a plant, 
and hire somebody for 30 cents an hour? I tell you what, the question 
of who is going to clear the products that are for sale from the 
shelves in this country is a very interesting question.
  Mr. Ford, when he opened his Ford plant to begin building 
automobiles, believed that you ought to pay a wage to the workers that 
gave the workers a chance to buy the product they make. In the larger 
aggregate sense, the question is, Who will buy the products on the 
shelves if people do not have jobs? You fire your workers and you make 
Hershey's mint patties in Mexico, or you make Hallmark Cards in China, 
or you decide to make bicycles, little red wagons, automobiles, trucks, 
and airplanes elsewhere. Who is going to be on the factory floor 
producing products in this country? Who is going to earn the wage by 
which they become consumers?
  We are short about 20 million jobs right now in this country, and 20 
million jobs is what we need to put people to work.
  We have just gone through commencement exercises in this country. 
There are a lot of kids who put on a cap and a gown with enormous 
pride, finally graduated from college, and a whole lot of them cannot 
find a thing to do. They cannot find work.
  This President, when he walked across the threshold of the door of 
the White House, inherited a $1.3 trillion Federal budget deficit left 
by the previous administration. Had he done nothing, had he been Rip 
Van Winkle and slept for 10 months or a year, we were going to have a 
$1.3 trillion deficit. That is what he inherited, and an economy that 
was in desperate condition.
  He has done everything he can to try to put this back on track. It is 
hard, and it requires both parties and the best ideas of both. This 
ought not be difficult. This idea of stopping this insidious subsidy 
from moving American jobs overseas ought to be an idea that takes root 
here and garners 90 votes, 95 votes. Instead, we have lost the vote on 
this amendment over recent years four times.
  I started by saying that President Barack Obama, when serving in the 
Senate, was a supporter of this amendment. He voted for this amendment 
and believed in this approach. He still does. He has talked about it. I 
hope very much we will get a vote in the Senate on this today or 
tomorrow and put the Senate on record as having taken the first step in 
doing something meaningful to shut the drain and begin the process of 
saying to people: If you stay here, if you manufacture here, if you run 
a plant here and produce a product here, God bless you. We are on your 
side. We are not going to give your competitors who leave and move jobs 
to China a tax break. We are on your side if you stay here.
  That is what we ought to be doing, investing in American jobs, 
investing in products made in our country, investing once again in a 
strong manufacturing base in order to remain a world-class economic 
power.
  Madam President, at that point, I have exhausted all of the arguments 
once again for this amendment, hoping that enough will have listened or 
perhaps be given information that this is a worthy vote if you want to 
stand up for American jobs.
  Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burris). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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