I appreciate the opportunity to speak today following the great senator from the state of Colorado. My topic is also manufacturing jobs in the United States. I just want to thank the senator from Colorado for every day coming to the floor and reminding us of the importance of the consequences of choices we make, whether it’s the tax policy choices of failing to extend the production tax credit and the consequences for high-quality manufacturing jobs in the wind industry, or the consequences for manufacturing all across our country, from the great state of New York to the state of Colorado to the state of Delaware.
What we’re on the floor today talking about is the Bring Jobs Home Act, which is just one of many important ways we can and should be fighting for high-quality manufacturing jobs in our home states and across our country.
Madam President, it was a very dark day when the Chrysler plant in Newark, Delaware, where I’m from, shut its doors. Built in the early 1950’s first as a tank plant, then converted to an auto plant, this was a manufacturing facility that had sustained whole communities over several generations with high-quality, high-skilled, highly-paid manufacturing jobs.
In December of 2008, they closed their doors for the very last time, and that plant has now been torn down to the ground. It is an empty hole in the heart of the city of Newark. You would have thought it couldn’t have gotten worse than the day that those thousands of workers filed out of the plant for the
very last time, but it did. Just a few short months later when the General Motors plant just a few miles away in Boxwood shuttered its doors. In just a year Delaware went from having two high-performing high-quality auto plants to none. We lost nearly 3,000 middle-class manufacturing jobs. And this was followed by a whole constellation of other plant closings from Avon which lost hundreds of jobs, to dozens of smaller manufacturers that had supported these auto plants for decades.
I know 3,000 jobs may not sound like a lot in the wreckage of the recession of 2008 to this whole country. But for Delawareans, for our small state and for all the families that were supported for so long, it was huge. I have an idea that I talk about all the time at home in Delaware, which is that we need to get back to ‘made in America and manufactured in Delaware.’
That means something to us, back in 1985 when I was just finishing school, transportation equipment manufacturing, which is the fancy way of saying making cars and all the stuff that goes in them, employed 10,000 people in Delaware. Today it’s well below a tenth of that. ‘Made in America, manufactured in Delaware’ has to mean something for our families, for our communities, for today and for our future.
Delaware was once a great and strong manufacturing state. As America was once the greatest manufacturing nation on Earth. Some believe those days are behind us, but I do not.
I know my colleague, Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan, the lead sponsor of the bill we’re debating, the Bring Jobs Home Act also does not believe our future as a world class, world leading manufacturer is behind us. I know the people of Michigan, the people of New York and the people of Delaware do not.
I had the great opportunity this morning to visit with two leaders of Delaware-based manufacturers that I just wanted to lift up for a moment today as we talk about the Bring Jobs Home Act. Marty Miller, C.E.O. of Miller Metal in Bridgeville, Delaware, has benefited from a powerful but little heralded federal program, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership that helps small manufacturers streamline their productions processes, reduce waste and inefficiency, do their ordering and through-put far more effectively and compete head to head around the world successfully.
This Manufacturing Extension Partnership has allowed Marty’s company to grow by 25 jobs in just the last year and to compete head to head with Chinese metal fabricating plants in the global market and win.
I.L.C. Dover has been known to Delawareans for its storied history in our space program. They made all the space suits for NASA but they’ve also made blimps that have hovered over Iraq and Afghanistan and protected our troops with downward looking radar and real time information. They make the escape hoods and the masks that are position around the periphery of this Chamber and throughout this building and the Pentagon.
They have made remarkable high-quality engineered soft goods for decades, and they too, I think, have had a promising future and the opportunity to grow even in this recovery because they too are focused on things ‘Made in America and manufactured in Delaware.’
These two companies, these two men, the organizations that they lead are in my view just an introduction to what can and should be a renaissance, a recovery of manufacturing in the United States. We still produce more in dollar value in manufacturing than any country on earth, but there’s been a downward slope in the number of jobs and in the sense of energy and investment and focus in our policy and our priorities in manufacturing for years.
I think we can become a great manufacturing nation again and our middle class can be stronger than ever but we have to make smarter choices. We have to make smarter choices in our tax code. We have to look at our tax code with an eye towards fairness and investment for the future and not just short-term profitability.
We need common sense and we need in my view to support companies that are creating jobs here and we need to cut our support for companies that instead want to create jobs in China, in India, in Vietnam, in Thailand, by exporting jobs from the United States. As our economy pulls back out of what has been a devastating recession, I can think of no more galling idea than this country incentivizing American companies to ship some of our best jobs overseas. And yet as, you know, madam president, our current tax code allows businesses to duct the cost of moving expenses: permits, license fees, lease brokerage fees, equipment installation costs and other expenses.
You can take this deduction if you’re moving from Bridgeville, Delaware to Birmingham, Alabama. But it also turns out that you can take it if you are moving from Bridgeville to Bangalore or Beijing. Can you think of a worse way to spend taxpayer dollars?
This is a loophole, madam president, so big you can drive a car through it. Right out of the shuttered manufacturing plants of Delaware. Fixing this fundamental injustice in our tax code is the first half of the Bring Jobs Home Act. We say we’re not going to pay any more for companies that send U.S. jobs overseas. We’ve got better ways to invest our tax dollars in rebuilding the base of manufacturing and the high-quality, high-paying jobs that come from it.
The second thing this bill does, instead of incentivizing the outsourcing of American jobs is incentivizing insourcing. We say bring these jobs home. The Bring Jobs Home Act says you can keep the deduction to help pay your moving costs if you’re moving from one facility in the U.S. to another, that’s fine. You can still using the moving cost deduction if you’re moving from a facility abroad back to the United States. That’s better. But this bill takes a further step. We say if you bring jobs home to the U.S., we’ll give you an additional 20% tax credit on the costs associated with moving that production back to the U.S.
The message of this bill is straightforward, madam president. If you’re an American company and you’ve got manufacturing jobs or service jobs that could be done by Americans, we want you to bring those jobs home. And we’re going to help you do it.
For my small state, I want to keep saying every chance I get, what we want is ‘made in America and manufactured in Delaware.’ Lord knows we have the work force. There’s an army of talented Delawareans and Americans ready to go. Ford knows it, Caterpillar knows it, GE knows it, as we heard from Senator Stabenow, that’s why they’ve brought jobs home. They’re opening up new plants in the U.S. and putting Americans back to work.
There is a company in Newark, Delaware called FMC BioPolymer – they make specialty chemicals. They’ve run a factor in Newark, Delaware for 50 years – in fact, exactly 50 years this year. They make a type of cellulose you’d find in everyday products, foods, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, cleaning products. They had outsourced some of their manufacturing to China to save costs. But as you can imagine when you’re working with these sorts of advanced products that go into consumer products, safety is key and for performance and engineering and intellectual property and safety reasons, they brought some of their most critical jobs home. They employ more than a 100 people and contribute more than $20 million to our local economy every year and it’s an important part of our economy.
So for FMC BioPolymer I say thank you for bringing jobs home and strengthening ‘made in America, manufactured in Delaware.’ If big companies and small companies are figuring this out, when will the federal government, when will this Congress figure it out as well?
The best thing we can do for our economy, for millions of talented Americans looking for work, from our returning veterans to those who have searched so hard for work for the last two or three years, we can invest in them. We can pass the Bring Jobs Home Act as a smart choice to invest in American workers and their communities, to invest in their education, their schools and their teachers, to invest in our infrastructure, in our roads, in our power grid to make smarter choices as a country and as a Congress.
There is no better investment I can think than to make this phrase real, to return to made in America and manufactured in the states of every one of the senators of this great body. This is common sense.
Alas, in the United States Senate, common sense these days rarely seems to win the day. I hope those watching, I hope those whom we represent, take this seriously and recognize that the most important question before us, madam president, is what are we going to do to take the fight in the global economy on behalf of our families, on behalf of our communities, on behalf of our manufacturers and change things in our tax code, in our trade policy, in our intellectual property policy, to make it possible to not just invent things here and make them elsewhere, but to invent them here and make them here?
Madam President, I hope that this body will proceed to vote in favor of the Bringing Jobs Home Act so that for every one of our home states we can make this phrase true, that we want things made in America and manufactured in our home states.
Thank you and with that I yield the floor.