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Unions
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I appreciate being recognized.
I want to start with a short little story. A month after--well, maybe 2 weeks after--President Biden took office, I was invited as the new chair of a major Senate Committee, the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. I think the Presiding Officer was there that day, too. We met in the Oval Office with the President of the United States.
We sat in a semicircle, and I saw that the painting behind President Biden was of Franklin Roosevelt. He was surrounded by busts of Harry Truman, Rosa Parks, Dr. King, Cesar Chavez, and Robert Kennedy. He asked us to go around the room and tell what interests us, what kind of things we should be doing.
When it was my turn, I talked about the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and I talked about the child tax credit, which, after we passed it, it was a $3,000 tax cut to 92 percent of the families in my State and a similar percent in the Presiding Officer's State of Michigan. Families with children received a $3,000 tax cut, the biggest in American history.
I spoke about housing, and then I said, at the end of my little minute and a half: Mr. President, thank you for talking about unions.
He kind of smiled and said: Of course.
When the meeting was over, after 45 minutes or so, the President walked toward me and said: Why wouldn't I mention unions?
I said: Mr. President, I have been in this office a number of times over the last 25 years, and I have never heard a President talk about the unions the way you do.
That was the beginning. We then passed the recovery act and have done so much more with the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
He has always put the emphasis on workers, putting workers at the center of our economic policy and workers at the center of our country and at the center of our economy.
Let me illustrate. In the last 2 weeks--I know that Senator Hassan, who is about to preside today, when she went back to New Hampshire during these 2 weeks, she was talking to families and workers, and Senator Peters, who is presiding, from Michigan, did the same--what struck me is that we had four sort of Cabinet-level people from the Biden administration who came to Ohio during these couple of weeks. I was with three of them. With one of them, we couldn't work out schedules.
The head of the EPA was in Ohio. Do you know what he talked about? He talked about how we replace--Ohio, unfortunately, is No. 2 in the country in the number of contaminated pipes connecting main water lines going into people's homes, contaminated with lead. We are, because of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, going to replace those 600,000 pipes. We are going to replace them with U.S., Made-in-America iron and steel and other components, because in infrastructure, we passed the strongest--and Senator Hassan was part of this and others. We passed the strongest ``Buy America'' provisions ever in American history. If you are going to spend American tax dollars, you are going to hire American workers to do that.
Administrator Regan of the EPA talked about what that means. It means thousands of jobs for pipefitters and other union trades people. It also means clean water going into moderate- and low-income families' homes in Appalachia and East Cleveland and everywhere in between. And that means healthier children.
Then the Secretary of the Department of Labor came. The Department of Labor Secretary with President Biden's predecessor was essentially a corporate lawyer. I would use the word--this might sound disrespectful, and I apologize ahead of time--a hack. Fundamentally, he was a guy who spent his career making, I assume, millions of dollars a year working for a prestigious law firm, busting unions, and always siding with employers and with big corporations against workers. That was the predecessor.
The Secretary of Labor under President Biden came out of Boston. He was a former laborer. He was a former union laborer. Make that contrast. Then I spent part of the time in Lakewood, a Cleveland suburb--in the city of Cleveland and in Lakewood--and then Fremont, OH, with the new Chair of the Export-Import Bank, talking about jobs, talking about workers, talking about getting help competing with the Chinese, with the Export-Import Bank, always with an emphasis on wages.
We know what has happened the last 50 years. I went to high school and walked the halls of Mansfield Senior High School and Johnny Appleseed Junior High School with the sons and daughters of machinists who worked at Ohio Brass, of electrical workers who worked at Westinghouse, of autoworkers who worked at GM, of rubber workers who worked at Mansfield Tire, and with the sons and daughters of laborers and operating engineers, millwrights, carpenters, pipefitters, painters, and electricians--all making middle-class union wages that really built a decent economy for tens of thousands of families in my community.
I know what that meant, and then we saw corporate leaders: First they shut down production in places like Mansfield, my hometown, or Springfield or Toledo. They moved to Alabama or Tennessee or Arkansas--
low wages, few unions, weak unemployment compensation, sort of inadequate unemployment workers' compensation programs for injured and unemployed workers.
But those wages weren't low enough. So these same corporate leaders went on a scavenger hunt to Mexico and China--all over the world--to try to find the cheapest labor possible.
And do you know what? Far too many Presidents and far too many people in this body helped them do that. That is why this President is so important and why this Senate is so important--that we can fight back.
We are seeing now that the whole idea of this administration is to begin to bring these jobs back home and treat these workers with respect and begin, again, to rebuild the middle class.
The last Cabinet Secretary to come in who I spent a full day with was in Chillicothe, OH, in southern Ohio. It is a small community hurt by globalization. There is a VA hospital. It is one of the oldest VA hospitals in the country. And these workers--there was a Commission started by President Trump that is slating the closure of the Chillicothe VA.
Today, Presiding Officer Senator Hassan and I were in the Veterans' Committee asking about workers--with Senator Tester presiding and Senator Boozman, a good bipartisan team on Veterans' Affairs--what do we do to make sure these workers are whole, that we train workers, that they are not burning out by all the tension and the pressure and the anxiety they face now?
In sitting with Secretary Denis McDonough, the new Secretary of the VA, the Biden Secretary of the VA, it was a pleasure watching him interact with these workers, interacting with Jessica Fee, who is the union president, at Chillicothe, the American Federation of Government Employees. President Kelley, the international president, was there. Ms. Simon, his assistant, was there, listening to these workers, listening to what do we do to train enough LPNs, licensed practical nurses? What do we do to train enough nurses? What do we do to train enough physical therapists? And how do we keep this hospital open? Because so many veterans care so deeply about this hospital.
So the last 2 weeks what motivates me in this job is my job really, in so many ways, is how do you speak for those who don't have a voice? How do you fight for those--it is always whom you fight for and what you fight against. I am not interested in opposing Senator McConnell because he blocks a whole bunch of stuff that we care about. I am not interested in opposing him; I am interested in fighting against some of the things he does.
But I am interested in fighting for these workers at the VA. I am interested in fighting for these pipefitters who are going to lay these clean pipes without lead contamination, making these children in Appalachian Ohio, in East Cleveland, in East Columbus, OH--making them more whole. I am interested in helping these workers who DOL finally sides with instead of siding with corporate interest.
During these 2 weeks, I went to a Starbucks in Columbus, and these workers are trying to organize a union. They know that carrying a union card--carrying a union card means better wages; it means better benefits; it means more control over your work schedule. Of course, Starbucks is fighting the union, but finally we have a government that is helping these small businesses export more. And we have a government that is going to finally side with veterans and side with workers at VA hospitals.
The last 2 weeks is--and for me it has been a celebration, as Studs Terkel said in an introduction of a book called, ``Christ in Concrete,'' a book written in the late 1930s about an immigrant worker. It came out the same week as ``Grapes of Wrath,'' and, interestingly, it was chosen over ``Grapes of Wrath'' for the Book-of-the-Month Club, even though ``Grapes of Wrath'' had a little bit more staying power.
But Studs Terkel talked in his introduction about celebrating the uncelebrated, and that is really what we should be doing here. You celebrate those workers. It is not the corporations; it is not the President; it is not the big shots; it is really the workers who power this economy, the workers who make the VA work, the workers who will lay those pipes, the workers who are the small business people succeeding and competing with China in countries around the world, the workers at the VA.
That is what the last 2 weeks for me was about. It is why the honor of having this job and fighting for these workers gets me up every day.
I yield the floor.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 73
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