American Jobs

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Speaker, let me thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I certainly appreciate it. And I want to thank her for taking up this important issue of trade agreements, trade generally and trade promotion authority.

I just want to say that Minnesota has had its experience with trade agreements. According to policy experts, if you look at the North American Free Trade Agreement, which lifted tariffs and other trade barriers between North American countries, it has led to the outsourcing of over 30,000 Minnesota jobs. It also did bring in some jobs; but the net outcome, after you take the lost jobs and the gained jobs together, is a loss of 13,700 jobs.

So the thing is that some people say, well, trade will help. It will help some people. But when you look at everybody, it has not been a job gainer for us, as it was promised to be. And I think that is very important.

I am glad that Congressman Ryan and you and others have been speaking in a local framework. I am glad to hear about New York and Ohio.

I can just tell you from my own State of Minnesota, we are not afraid of trade. We believe we have got the best workers in the world and we can compete with anybody, but only on the basis of a fair trade. We believe we can compete, we can make great products, but when other countries are dumping, when they are manipulating their currency, when all types of crazy things are happening like that, then we are not talking about fair trade. We are talking about free trade, and free trade is free-for-all trade, and free-for-all is not going to be good.

I can assure you that when the trade deal comes that really does support labor standards and environmental standards in the right way, I won't be standing against it. But until then, I have to stand against it.

I just also want to say that there has been a lot of talk recently because of this Trans-Pacific Partnership, this deal that has been negotiated over the last several months, and there is a lot of concern about it. But before people get really worried about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is the new trade deal, the new NAFTA, I think they ought to worry about something called Fast Track or Trade Promotion Authority, because here is the thing.

Whether you like these trade deals or you don't like them, I doubt that you believe that they are perfect as they come out of the hands of the U.S. Trade Representative and all these other countries. I doubt you believe that they couldn't benefit from any negotiation or any amendment, because around here, we have never seen a perfect piece of legislation. Even the best can be improved. Yet, if we grant Trade Promotion Authority, we will only have an up-or-down vote. We will literally abandon our national sovereignty to other countries who will be able to sue American companies for lost profits.

I don't mind dealing in an American court, but I do have a problem being in an international court just because we want to ban smoking, just because we want better environmental regulation, just because we want to take care of our people. We may then be sued for lost profits by some foreign company.

Of course, one of the problems is that we don't know what the Trans-Pacific Partnership really is. People have seen pieces of it here and there, but we don't know because it has been negotiated in secret. And my constituents say, Well, KEITH, you send me--Congressman, you send me a copy of that Trans-Pacific Partnership. I want to know what it says.

And I say, Mr. Constituent, I can't send it to you because I don't have it. They haven't let me see it, not in its entirety. They send you pieces of it. You can look at this chapter or that chapter, but you can't look at the whole thing.

So they are going to basically, after they get their Trade Promotion Authority, they are going to give us a few weeks to basically look it over, and then we can only vote it up or down.

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Mr. ELLISON. Let me thank the gentlewoman.

Again, I just want to point out that President Obama correctly said that income inequality is the defining issue of our time. I think he was right when he said that.

When you look at why do we have the flat and declining wages that the Congressman from New York, Paul Tonko, just mentioned and that you have mentioned--why? What are the components of this?--I can tell you that it is clear that we have not invested in public infrastructure, which would put people to work and improve productivity. It is clear that we have cut the taxes of the wealthiest and the most privileged people in our society, and, literally, we have added them onto people in the middle, and we have failed to educate people properly. Yet one of the components that we can never forget is this trade policy. You cannot intelligently claim that you want to do something about income inequality and pass these trade deals which ship jobs overseas and put downward pressure on wages here.

This is a key part of how we get the American middle and working classes back to getting raises again.

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