Save American Workers Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for yielding.

I rise today in opposition to this bill, the so-called Save American Workers Act, and to speak in support of working men and women of this great country. I am here today and every day, not only as a Member of Congress, but as someone who knows what it is like to work for a living.

As someone who for 18 years as an ironworker strapped on a pair of work boots during boom times and down economies, I know what it is like to stand in an unemployment line when my local shipyard closed and when our auto plant shut down.

Mr. Speaker, I am part of the American workforce. Like many of my colleagues, I represent hundreds of thousands of hard-working people who struggle every day to make ends meet. That is why I am deeply offended that the Republican leadership of this House, the people's House, has the temerity to refer to any of their efforts in the context of saving the American worker.

Now, the simple fact is that during my time in Congress the actions of my colleagues, especially the Republican leadership, have spoken loudly to the contrary. It is impossible in the time allowed to me to cover all the anti-worker efforts that the Republican majority has undertaken since I have been in Congress. They have continually tried to roll back prevailing wage laws and workers' rights and protections that have been in place since the 1930s. They tried to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, put in place in 1935 to protect American workers.

Their attacks on the Federal workforce are ceaseless, freezing pay and cutting benefits, and demoralizing our hard-working men and women in government. The Republican leadership has opposed equal pay for women; they have opposed raising the minimum wage; they have opposed employee nondiscrimination legislation. In fact, they won't even bring some of those bills for a vote.

As we struggle to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the Republican leadership has refused to extend emergency unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed, many of whom use that money just to put food on the table while they search for work.

Now the Republican majority has the audacity to put forward a bill they call the Save American Workers Act. We have got to save the American worker from you. That is who we need to be saving them from.

The bill before us today is more of the same. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will add $74 billion to the Federal deficit, force 1 million more people to lose employer-covered health care, and leave 500,000 completely uninsured.

According to a study released by the University of California Berkley, this bill will cause 6.5 million workers to lose more hours. This bill, like so many others offered by my colleagues from across the aisle, is not crafted to save the American worker. It is crafted to increase the profits of large employers while workers continue to struggle.

Perhaps this bill should be named the ``Save American CEO Act.'' It is the height of hypocrisy, that after all their efforts to harm the American worker my colleagues should have the audacity to even offer a bill entitled ``Save American Workers Act.''

We all know and realize that we need to save the American worker from the Republican leadership. That is what we need to do. So I urge my colleagues to continue to oppose these efforts to destroy the middle class and sabotage the American worker and the American family.

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