[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 15895-15896]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           MAKE IT IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, tonight I will continue on a quest that 
we have been challenged with for the last 7 years, and that is how to 
grow the American economy.
  Coming out of the Great Recession, where we lost millions of jobs and 
some 2 million manufacturing jobs that were in addition to the previous 
6 million that had been lost in the years ahead of the Great Recession, 
we searched for how to rebuild the American economy and the great 
manufacturing base that once was the foundation for economic growth and 
the foundation for the middle class. This quest takes us yet again to, 
really, something that most Americans do not consider as manufacturing.
  Let me start with a very quick review of the project that we have 
been working on, which we call the Make It In America project, so that 
Americans can make it. Wouldn't we want all of our families to be able 
to make it in America, to be able to buy that house, to educate our 
kids, to take the vacation?
  So the Make It In America project includes trade, about which there 
has been much discussion in these recent years, in the debates in the 
election process; tax policy, which we will be dealing with shortly, 
and I may touch on that just lightly today; energy policy; labor; 
education; research; and infrastructure.
  These are some of the critical elements that we focus on when we talk 
about making it in America so that Americans can make it in America.
  Today I want to talk about a couple of pieces of this that we 
normally don't think about when we talk about manufacturing. So we will 
just put this up here and be reminded about American manufacturing.
  Think of the American farmer. Is that manufacturing? Well, I don't 
know. You take sun, water, earth, seeds, effort, entrepreneurialism, 
and you make something called food. We are going to take it just a step 
beyond that, because part of the manufacturing in America really is the 
preparation of food for Americans; in other words, the producing of the 
food taken out of the field and prepared for sale to American 
families--some of it in the grocery stores, some of it now in farmer's 
markets. But the manufacturing of food is a huge industry.
  It is also an industry that has enormous growth potential. We know 
that, for example, just in the Central Valley of California, which I 
represent--the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley--there are 
1,659 food and beverage manufacturing establishments that are part of 
that food chain: taking rice from the fields in my district to the 
brewery and producing something that many Americans want on a Sunday 
afternoon at the tailgate party before the football game, beer, or 
maybe it is from the vineyards to the winery, and then think about all 
of the other pieces that go into that. There is the package in which 
the six-pack is packed or the crate into which the bottles of wine are 
sent off to the local retail store.
  All of those pieces are also expanded by the machinery that is in the 
winery or in the brewery or in the tomato factory. All of these are 
jobs. And in many cases, these are American manufacturing jobs way, way 
back in the chain that have produced the pump or the electric motor or 
the pipe or the vat into which all of these products would be 
manufactured. So when we talk about manufacturing in the food industry, 
which is usually ignored when we talk about manufacturing in America, 
we need to realize that it is a huge part of the American economy and 
the American manufacturing scene.
  I was recently at one of the largest tomato packing plants in 
California, the CPC plant in Woodland, California, that produces every 
kind of tomato paste you might want, all of the tomato sauce, all of 
the salsa. You name it, it is manufactured there in a very complex 
environment in which, seasonally, there are 1,200 workers and, 
annually, 125 that are left to maintain, to improve the equipment, and 
to take care of any problems that occurred in that manufacturing 
process. There are also hundreds of employed truckers who then take 
those cases of tomato paste, put them on the truck, and ship them all 
the way across America, or put them on a train or put them in a 
container to be taken to the Port of Oakland and then shipped overseas.
  So when you consider the agricultural industry, think beyond the 
farmer. Think to what one of the bosses at a big winery in California 
told me as I was touring there a couple of years ago. When I was 
talking about manufacturing, he said: Hey, come. Let's take a look out 
the back of my office.
  I said: Fine. Let's go.
  He said: Do you see that?
  I said: Yes. Those are huge tanks and pumps and all the rest.
  He said: No. That is a manufacturing facility, and what we make is 
the best wine in the entire world.
  Indeed, it was very, very good wine.
  So when we talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America--
and there has been much discussion, as Mr. Trump has gone off to a 
Carrier plant in Indiana--we ought to also think about food 
manufacturing, and that is something that is not going to disappear 
from the American scene because, hey, it is grown here in America, and 
it needs to be processed here in America.
  I want to take this so that we understand the full extent of the 
potential here. And if we have these elements in place, we will be able 
to create a very significant number of jobs.
  Trade policy, I am not going to get into that anymore, but this is a 
big piece of every trade deal: Will American agriculture, the farmers 
and the processors of those products, be able to trade into the 
international market? By and large, American agriculture has been 
precluded, through various trade deals of the past, from being able to 
reach its full potential in international trade.
  I want to talk specifically about labor for a moment, and these are 
the statistics from the California Department of Labor Marketing and 
Information Division.
  Between 2012 and 2022--so 4 of those years have already gone by--
there will be, in California, 51,900 total openings in the food 
manufacturing sector. Some of those are replacements; 27,000 of those 
would be to replace people who are retiring and 24,000 will be new 
openings as the manufacturing of food expands. They are in every 
category you can imagine: packing and filling machine operators, 
cleaners of the vehicles and the equipment, inspectors, industrial 
machine mechanics, packers and packagers, drivers and sale workers, 
general operations, and managers.

[[Page 15896]]

That is a huge number. There are almost 52,000 new jobs available just 
in the food processing sector of the California economy.
  Now, we make policy around here in every one of these areas, and the 
policies can enhance the food industry in the United States and create 
even more jobs in the United States. I want to give one example, and 
this is a piece of legislation that we have introduced here in 
Congress. We call it the American Food for American Schools Act--
American food for American schools. It is H.R. 6299.
  Now, for years, we have had the School Lunch Act, providing 
nutritional food for kids at school, and the law has been pretty clear. 
It is Federal tax dollars, your tax dollars, mine. The American 
taxpayers' money is supposed to be used to buy American-produced food. 
So maybe it is a peach or an apple, or maybe it is orange juice or 
perhaps one of those little packages of mixed fruits. Whatever it 
happens to be, your tax dollars are supposed to be spent on American-
produced food.
  However, that is not necessarily the case, because there is a 
loophole as wide as a container ship, and schools across the Nation 
have been able to use that loophole to avoid buying American food, even 
though they are using American taxpayer dollars.

                              {time}  1800

  So what we intend to do here is to tighten up that loophole and make 
it clear that if a school district intends to buy food produced in 
China or in Egypt or anywhere else around the world that they will have 
to tell the public that they are not buying American food, they are 
buying food produced somewhere else around the world, and using the tax 
dollars from the parents to buy foreign food rather than supporting the 
American farmer.
  I want to give you a couple of examples of the egregious nature of 
this waiver. Sacramento, California, is at the heart of the canned 
peach industry. Nearly all the canned peaches are grown within 50 miles 
of Sacramento. The Sacramento City Unified School District decided 
that, to save a few cents per can, they would reach out and buy Chinese 
peaches. I don't mean a peach that is Chinese but, rather, peaches that 
are grown in China, canned in China under food security and safety 
regulations that are anybody's guess as to what they are, and serve 
that in California, in Sacramento.
  It turns out that that created a bit of a stir and a bit of a problem 
for the school district, and they backed off, but that big loophole 
remains, and so the American Food for American Schools Act would close 
that loophole, providing opportunities for employment here in the 
United States and, in the case of Sacramento, in the Sacramento region. 
So we tightened it up. We say if a school district wants to bypass the 
Federal law and use American taxpayer money to buy strawberries from 
Egypt--which, by the way, happened to have been contaminated and were 
actually purchased by a school district across this nation, 
contaminated with hepatitis A.
  Recalls occurred. School districts used those strawberries. In one 
case in California, they made smoothies of it. Fortunately, to this 
date, we know of no illnesses that have been caused. But, clearly, if 
they had bought American, this would not have been a problem. So there 
would be notification, and there would be a very tight loophole through 
which the school districts would have to pass to avoid this issue of 
using American taxpayer dollars to buy American food.
  So the American Food for American Schools Act will have to be taken 
up next year. I believe it already is a bipartisan bill, and I would 
expect that next year it will have even more support as we make it 
clear that if we want to make it in America then we have to use our 
laws to support the American manufacturing sector. And tonight, if it 
is not yet clear, I will say it again. The farmer manufactures food--
sunlight, water, soil, nutrients, entrepreneurial activity, hard work 
and labor to make the food--and then that food moves through the 
processing chain, creating additional manufacturing jobs. By the way, 
these are not low-paying jobs. The average is $20 an hour. So we are 
talking about wages that are at the bottom end of the middle class 
structure.
  What we are looking at here are many different ways to achieve a 
rebirth, a regeneration of the American manufacturing sector, and today 
we bring something that I think most people didn't expect when we talk 
about making it in America. They didn't expect us to be saying that if 
we are going to make it in America, if Americans are going to be able 
to make it, then we ought to look to the manufacturing sector, broadly 
defined, whether it is agriculture or, as we talked about last week in 
the manufacturing of high-speed rail, the manufacturing of trains and 
vehicles of all kinds.
  So when your tax dollars are being spent, I would ask all of my 
colleagues and all of the public: Hey, are my tax dollars being spent 
on American-made goods and services, or are you buying foreign? That is 
a question for us to answer here and to write laws that encourage that 
your tax dollars will be spent on American-made goods and services. So 
we can make it in America. We can manufacture in America, and America 
can prosper as a result of the laws and the policies we put in place 
here.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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