Increasing economic divide
Rep. Bernie Sanders / Continued

   Unfortunately, the advocates of unfettered free trade are wrong again. We now know that blue collar manufacturing jobs are not the only casualty of unfettered free trade. Estimates are that some 50,000 to 60,000 high-tech white collar jobs have been lost in this country in the last two years, and that many of them have ended up in India. If any of the listeners sometimes want to argue with the phone company that your phone bill was wrong, you get on the phone and you are calling up and arguing, well, you may end up going not to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles, you may be talking to somebody in India. And that is happening more and more.
   According to Forest Research, a major consultant on this issue, they say, and I quote, ``Over the next 15 years 3.3 million U.S. service industry jobs and $136 billion in wages will move offshore. The information technology industry will lead the initial overseas exodus.'' That is from Forest Research. According to Booz Allen Hamilton, companies can lower their costs by as much as 80 percent by shifting tasks such as computer programming, accounting, and procurement, to China.
   Among many other companies moving high-tech jobs abroad is Microsoft, which is spending $750 million over the next 3 years on research and development and outsourcing in China. Just the other day, just last week, Intel Corporation chairman Andy Grove warned that the U.S. could lose the bulk of its information technology jobs to overseas competitors in the next decade, largely to India and China.
   In other words, Mr. Speaker, not only has unfettered free trade cost us our textile industry, cost us our shoe industry, our steel industry, our tool and die industry, our electronic industry, much of our furniture industry, as well as many, many other industries, it is now going to cost us, unless we change it, millions of high-tech jobs as well.
   Now, let me be very clear. The United States needs to have a strong and positive relationship with China. I am not anti-Chinese. I am an internationalist. China is the largest country on Earth, and this country must have a good and positive relationship with China; and there are a number of ways that we can do that. But doing that, having a positive relationship with China, does not mean allowing corporate America and their supporters in the White House, in Congress, to destroy the American middle class by making jobs America's No. 1 export.
   We want our exports to be products manufactured by American workers, not the jobs that American workers have. If we continue to force American workers to, quote unquote, compete against desperate people from China and other developing countries, both in manufacturing and high tech, the United States will be the loser.
   By definition a sensible and fair trade agreement works well for both parties, not just for one. Trade is a good thing. Trade is a good thing when both sides benefit. The New York Yankees do not engage in free trade by exchanging their top ball player for a third-string minor leaguer.
   The United States is the most lucrative market in the world. We need to leverage the value of that market to achieve trade agreements that result in fairness for the American worker. And we can do that. Trade is a good thing. But our current trade policies are not working for American workers.
   When we talk about trade with China, Mr. Speaker, we should also understand that today 60 percent, 60 percent of Dell Computer parts are made in China. Boeing recently said that it expected to purchase $1 billion worth of aviation equipment annually in China by 2009 and $1.3 billion by 2010, up from $500 million this year.
   North Carolina's Pillowtex Corp. filed for bankruptcy on July 20, 2003, laying off 6,450 of its 7,650 workers and made plans to sell its textile-producing machinery to several nations, including China. Over the past year, Intel has added 1,000 software engineers in China and India. And on and on it goes. The bottom line is that American workers cannot and must not be forced to compete against workers in China who are paid extremely low wages.
   Two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion citizens live on less than a dollar a day. The average factory wage in China is 40 cents an hour, 1/40th of what U.S. factory workers are paid. The average annual salary for an information technology programmer in the U.S. is $75,000; in China it is $8,952.
   Mr. Speaker, for all of these reasons and more, I have introduced H.R. 3228, which would repeal permanent normal trade relations with China. My legislation, once again, would repeal permanent normal trade relations with China. It will acknowledge that our current trade policies with that country are a failure. And we have got to begin negotiating trade policies not only with China but with other countries that work well for the American worker and the American middle class.
   I am happy to say that, in just over three weeks, this tripartisan legislation has garnered 52 co-sponsors, including 14 Republicans. So we are moving forward in that area, Mr. Speaker, in a tripartisan way.
   Mr. Speaker, when we talk about the decline of the middle class, we are talking about high unemployment; we are talking about the conversion of the United States from a manufacturing economy to a service economy whereby wages and benefits are much lower.
   We are also talking about the fact that in the United States, workers today are now working the longest hours of the workers in any major country on Earth. There should be little wonder why the average American family is so stressed out. And one of the reasons that they are so stressed out is that people are working incredibly long hours in order to make enough money to pay the bills. Today, the average American employee works by far the longest hours of any worker in the industrialized world, and the situation is getting worse.
   According to statistics from the International Labor Organization, the average American last year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours in 1990. That is an increase of almost one week of work. Since 1990, the average American is now working an additional week a year of work. We are now, as Americans, putting more hours into our work than at any time since the 1920s.
   Just think about that. Huge increases in productivity and an explosion of technology, logically, would lead one to believe that people would be working fewer hours for higher wages, but the converse is true. People are working longer hours for lower wages. Americans are now putting in more hours at our work than at any time since the 1920s -- 65 years after the formal establishment of the 40-hour work week under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost 40 percent of Americans now work more than 50 hours a week; and we should do a lot of thinking about that.
   An explosion of productivity and technology, people working longer and longer hours; and in almost every instance in the middle class, two breadwinners are needed to pay the bills. Real wages for workers in the private sector have declined since 1973. The rich get richer. The middle class shrinks and poverty increases.
   Mr. Speaker . . . let us look for a moment at the people who are not even in the middle class. People who have not made it into the middle class. People who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder in our country, the 34.8 million people in America who live in poverty. Sadly, Mr. Speaker, while the rich get richer, 1.3 million more Americans became poor and entered poverty, the group of poor people in America.
   In the midst of those people, Mr. Speaker, we have got to ask about the 11 million Americans who are trying to survive on the pathetic minimum wage of $5.15 an hour which exists here, and I think it is morally repugnant that this Congress voted to provide huge tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, but somehow the president of the United States and the Republican leadership, not for one moment have thought about raising the minimum wage, which today is at a pathetic $5.15 cents an hour.
   How do people earning those wages survive? And I will tell you how some of them do it. After working 40 hours a week, they live in their automobiles because they cannot afford housing units in order to survive. They just cannot afford the housing because their wages cannot pay the rent. And what, Mr. Speaker, about the 43.6 million Americans who lack any health insurance? That is 15.2 percent of our population.
   What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in this year, 1.3 million of them children? What about our elderly citizens who cannot afford the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs? And the many of them who cut their pills in half or do not even bother trying to fill the prescriptions that their doctors write for them? What about those people? What about the veterans who have put their lives on the line defending this country and then try to get into a VA hospital but find out that they are on a waiting list?
    . . . Now, Mr. Speaker, given the very, very serious problems facing the American people and especially our middle class, it is appropriate, I believe, to ask what President Bush and his administration have done to begin addressing some of these problems. What are their priorities? What are they doing to reach out to the middle class and say we are going to expand the middle class; we are going to lower poverty; we are going to improve health care? What are they doing in that direction?
   Well, let me tell you a little bit about what they have done. They have given hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very richest people in our country while cutting back on the basic needs of working families. Now, at a time when the middle class is shrinking, when poverty is increasing, when the number of people without health insurance is going up, when unemployment is far too high, who are the people that the Bush administration are reaching out to? Well, needless to say, it is their campaign contributors and the very wealthiest people in this country, who have received hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks.
   Through legislative and administration efforts, the Bush administration is making it more and more difficult for workers to form unions and to protect their jobs and incomes. When a worker is a member of a union, by and large that worker will earn 30 percent more than a worker doing a similar job who is nonunion. That is why many workers want to join unions, and yet it is getting harder and harder for workers to do that because the law very clearly sides with the employer and the large corporation, and not with the worker.
   The Bush administration, if you can believe it, is now attacking overtime for American workers and trying to undo laws that have been on the books for decades which say that if you worked over 40 hours a week, you will get time and a half. And I am proud that a number of Republicans join many of us on this floor of the House to say that when the middle class is shrinking, when real wages are declining, we are not going to cut back on the overtime pay that workers need.

   Now, when we talk about the achievements of the Bush administration, and we understand that our deficit is now at an all-time high, that our national debt is going higher, that in the midst of all of this, our conservative friends who year after year told us how terrible deficits were and what kind of terrible obligations we were leaving to our kids and our grandchildren, well, these are the folks that are driving up the deficit, and they are driving up the national debt. Now, why are they doing that? Why are conservatives doing that?
   Well, I think there are two reasons. Number one, obviously, the tax breaks for the rich are not hard to understand. Here in Washington, D.C. there are fund-raising dinners in which individuals have contributed $25,000 a plate, large corporations and their executives make huge contributions and that is payback time. Nothing new. The rich make contributions. They get paid back in tax breaks. They get paid back in corporate welfare. They get paid back with their trade policy which makes it easier for them to throw American workers out on the street and move out to China. That we can understand. That is obscene, but easily understood.
   But, Mr. Speaker, let me suggest to you that there is another even more cynical reason for driving up this deficit and driving up the national debt. And I believe that that reason is that as the debt and the deficit become higher and higher, this President, or any other President, may be forced to come before the American people and say our deficit and our debt is so very high that we have no choice but to privatize Social Security, privatize Medicare, privatize Medicaid, privatize public education.
   We have got to do it. We have a huge deficit. Oh, yeah, we did give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the rich; but nonetheless, the deficit is so high that we are going to have to do away with all of the benefits, all of the guarantees that the American people have fought for over the last 100 years; and it is my belief that this administration really does want to take us back to the 19th century, where working people and the middle class had no protections whatsoever, where workers and poor people were dependent upon the largess of the wealthy for charity, but there were no guarantees.
   Social Security has its problems; and in my view, Social Security must be strengthened. Seniors must be receiving larger COLAs, but the solution to the problems that we may have are not to privatize Social Security and bring us back to the 1920s when elderly people were the poorest segment of our society; but that is the direction that these folks are moving us towards, and they are moving us toward the privatization of Medicare.
   Think about how many private insurance companies are really going to provide insurance for elderly, low-income sick people. The function of an insurance company is to make money, not to provide health care; and if a person is old and sick and poor, who is going to insure them? They are on their own.
   . . . So, Mr. Speaker, let me conclude by stating that it is high time that the Congress of the United States begin to focus on the needs of the middle class, the vast majority of our people, the middle class of which is shrinking, the middle class in which the average person is working longer hours and for lower wages. America will grow when the middle class grows; and to do that, we need some fundamental changes in our policies.
   We need a national health care system which guarantees health care to all Americans. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. We need to fundamentally change our trade policies so that we do not continue to see the collapse of manufacturing. We need to make sure that every American, regardless of income, has a right to go to college. We need to rescind the tax breaks that have been given to the wealthiest people and the largest corporations, and create a tax structure which works for the middle class and not just for the wealthy and the powerful.
   There is a lot of work that must be done and I look forward to participating in that effort.

| Top of page | Beginning of article | Back to Oh!pinion weblog |