Date: 2003-07-23
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. the most troubling part of this debate for me is that with the trade agreements that we have signed. and no one discounts the importance of trade to this country and to the world economy. that we continue to see that Americans subsidize this trade policy with the loss of their goodwage jobs. We are told time and again. as we were just recently this wek. in the Wall Street Journal that those jobs are not coming back. This is not a question of losing your job in recession because of a slow economic time in manufacturing and then you get called back to your workplace. You are not going to get called back because your job has left the country. We said at the beginning of this trade debate some 15 or 20 years ago that the lowpaid jobs. the notsogood jobs were the jobs that would go overseas and because 3f increased trade and because of our intellectual capacity and our ingenuity that Americans would get the good jobs. that the hot. heavy. dirty jobs would go overseas. the lowwage jobs would go overseas. But now what we see is that. in fact. middleclass jobs are leaving America to go overseas and in many instances what I am certain people would consider the highwage jobs. as we were told again in the Wall Street Journal this week. are going overseas. $60.000ayear softwarewriting jobs. computer engineering jobs are being sent overseas where they can be done for $5.000 a year. It is just an economic swap. You simply have a job that you have here in California or Minnesota or Florida and you decide that this job you are paying for. as IBM did. you paid $60.000 for this job. you can have it done in India for $5.000. and that is simply an economic equation and it makes a lot of sense. It is just not very good for middle America. These trade agreements continue to be an assault on middle America. What I do not understand is why we insist that that be the case. Because I think it is clear that we can have expanded trade. we can open up markets. we can open up markets for American products and services and talent and at the same time hold onto these jobs. What we now see is in every industry those highwage jobs are being traded in for lowwage jobs. It is true in steel. It is true in the automobile industry. You say. well. that is oldfashioned jobs. that is an oldfashioned industry. No. what is oldfashioned about those industries is they had middleclass jobs. You could buy a house. you could buy a car. you could send your kid to school. That is what was oldfashioned about them. And even on the cutting edge of technology. in the steel industry or the automobile industry. they are being sent overseas. even from other countries. We are doing it in insurance and financial services and computer engineering and softwarewriting. The point is this. that the first generation of this trade agreement was we wanted to open up Chinese markets so we could sell into the Chinese market. Now what we see is the next generation of cuttingedge technology and cuttingedge countries not just from the United States but from all over the world that are going to China for the purposes of exporting. Those are jobs that are leaving here. Those are middleclass jobs. That is the assault on middleclass jobs. As long as we do not rise up and give workers the right to organize in other countries. then it is a fiction. It is a fiction that somehow we are going to protect American jobs.