Make It In America

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, tonight I will continue on a quest that we have been challenged with for the last 7 years, and that is how to grow the American economy.

Coming out of the Great Recession, where we lost millions of jobs and some 2 million manufacturing jobs that were in addition to the previous 6 million that had been lost in the years ahead of the Great Recession, we searched for how to rebuild the American economy and the great manufacturing base that once was the foundation for economic growth and the foundation for the middle class. This quest takes us yet again to, really, something that most Americans do not consider as manufacturing.

Let me start with a very quick review of the project that we have been working on, which we call the Make It In America project, so that Americans can make it. Wouldn't we want all of our families to be able to make it in America, to be able to buy that house, to educate our kids, to take the vacation?

So the Make It In America project includes trade, about which there has been much discussion in these recent years, in the debates in the election process; tax policy, which we will be dealing with shortly, and I may touch on that just lightly today; energy policy; labor; education; research; and infrastructure.

These are some of the critical elements that we focus on when we talk about making it in America so that Americans can make it in America.

Today I want to talk about a couple of pieces of this that we normally don't think about when we talk about manufacturing. So we will just put this up here and be reminded about American manufacturing.

Think of the American farmer. Is that manufacturing? Well, I don't know. You take sun, water, earth, seeds, effort, entrepreneurialism, and you make something called food. We are going to take it just a step beyond that, because part of the manufacturing in America really is the preparation of food for Americans; in other words, the producing of the food taken out of the field and prepared for sale to American families--some of it in the grocery stores, some of it now in farmer's markets. But the manufacturing of food is a huge industry.

It is also an industry that has enormous growth potential. We know that, for example, just in the Central Valley of California, which I represent--the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley--there are 1,659 food and beverage manufacturing establishments that are part of that food chain: taking rice from the fields in my district to the brewery and producing something that many Americans want on a Sunday afternoon at the tailgate party before the football game, beer, or maybe it is from the vineyards to the winery, and then think about all of the other pieces that go into that. There is the package in which the six-pack is packed or the crate into which the bottles of wine are sent off to the local retail store.

All of those pieces are also expanded by the machinery that is in the winery or in the brewery or in the tomato factory. All of these are jobs. And in many cases, these are American manufacturing jobs way, way back in the chain that have produced the pump or the electric motor or the pipe or the vat into which all of these products would be manufactured. So when we talk about manufacturing in the food industry, which is usually ignored when we talk about manufacturing in America, we need to realize that it is a huge part of the American economy and the American manufacturing scene.

I was recently at one of the largest tomato packing plants in California, the CPC plant in Woodland, California, that produces every kind of tomato paste you might want, all of the tomato sauce, all of the salsa. You name it, it is manufactured there in a very complex environment in which, seasonally, there are 1,200 workers and, annually, 125 that are left to maintain, to improve the equipment, and to take care of any problems that occurred in that manufacturing process. There are also hundreds of employed truckers who then take those cases of tomato paste, put them on the truck, and ship them all the way across America, or put them on a train or put them in a container to be taken to the Port of Oakland and then shipped overseas.

So when you consider the agricultural industry, think beyond the farmer. Think to what one of the bosses at a big winery in California told me as I was touring there a couple of years ago. When I was talking about manufacturing, he said: Hey, come. Let's take a look out the back of my office.

I said: Fine. Let's go.
He said: Do you see that?
I said: Yes. Those are huge tanks and pumps and all the rest.
He said: No. That is a manufacturing facility, and what we make is the best wine in the entire world.
Indeed, it was very, very good wine.

So when we talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America-- and there has been much discussion, as Mr. Trump has gone off to a Carrier plant in Indiana--we ought to also think about food manufacturing, and that is something that is not going to disappear from the American scene because, hey, it is grown here in America, and it needs to be processed here in America.

I want to take this so that we understand the full extent of the potential here. And if we have these elements in place, we will be able to create a very significant number of jobs.

Trade policy, I am not going to get into that anymore, but this is a big piece of every trade deal: Will American agriculture, the farmers and the processors of those products, be able to trade into the international market? By and large, American agriculture has been precluded, through various trade deals of the past, from being able to reach its full potential in international trade.

I want to talk specifically about labor for a moment, and these are the statistics from the California Department of Labor Marketing and Information Division.

Between 2012 and 2022--so 4 of those years have already gone by-- there will be, in California, 51,900 total openings in the food manufacturing sector. Some of those are replacements; 27,000 of those would be to replace people who are retiring and 24,000 will be new openings as the manufacturing of food expands. They are in every category you can imagine: packing and filling machine operators, cleaners of the vehicles and the equipment, inspectors, industrial machine mechanics, packers and packagers, drivers and sale workers, general operations, and managers. That is a huge number. There are almost 52,000 new jobs available just in the food processing sector of the California economy.

Now, we make policy around here in every one of these areas, and the policies can enhance the food industry in the United States and create even more jobs in the United States. I want to give one example, and this is a piece of legislation that we have introduced here in Congress. We call it the American Food for American Schools Act-- American food for American schools. It is H.R. 6299.

Now, for years, we have had the School Lunch Act, providing nutritional food for kids at school, and the law has been pretty clear. It is Federal tax dollars, your tax dollars, mine. The American taxpayers' money is supposed to be used to buy American-produced food. So maybe it is a peach or an apple, or maybe it is orange juice or perhaps one of those little packages of mixed fruits. Whatever it happens to be, your tax dollars are supposed to be spent on American-produced food.

However, that is not necessarily the case, because there is a loophole as wide as a container ship, and schools across the Nation have been able to use that loophole to avoid buying American food, even though they are using American taxpayer dollars.

So what we intend to do here is to tighten up that loophole and make it clear that if a school district intends to buy food produced in China or in Egypt or anywhere else around the world that they will have to tell the public that they are not buying American food, they are buying food produced somewhere else around the world, and using the tax dollars from the parents to buy foreign food rather than supporting the American farmer.

I want to give you a couple of examples of the egregious nature of this waiver. Sacramento, California, is at the heart of the canned peach industry. Nearly all the canned peaches are grown within 50 miles of Sacramento. The Sacramento City Unified School District decided that, to save a few cents per can, they would reach out and buy Chinese peaches. I don't mean a peach that is Chinese but, rather, peaches that are grown in China, canned in China under food security and safety regulations that are anybody's guess as to what they are, and serve that in California, in Sacramento.

It turns out that that created a bit of a stir and a bit of a problem for the school district, and they backed off, but that big loophole remains, and so the American Food for American Schools Act would close that loophole, providing opportunities for employment here in the United States and, in the case of Sacramento, in the Sacramento region. So we tightened it up. We say if a school district wants to bypass the Federal law and use American taxpayer money to buy strawberries from Egypt--which, by the way, happened to have been contaminated and were actually purchased by a school district across this nation, contaminated with hepatitis A.

Recalls occurred. School districts used those strawberries. In one case in California, they made smoothies of it. Fortunately, to this date, we know of no illnesses that have been caused. But, clearly, if they had bought American, this would not have been a problem. So there would be notification, and there would be a very tight loophole through which the school districts would have to pass to avoid this issue of using American taxpayer dollars to buy American food.

So the American Food for American Schools Act will have to be taken up next year. I believe it already is a bipartisan bill, and I would expect that next year it will have even more support as we make it clear that if we want to make it in America then we have to use our laws to support the American manufacturing sector. And tonight, if it is not yet clear, I will say it again. The farmer manufactures food-- sunlight, water, soil, nutrients, entrepreneurial activity, hard work and labor to make the food--and then that food moves through the processing chain, creating additional manufacturing jobs. By the way, these are not low-paying jobs. The average is $20 an hour. So we are talking about wages that are at the bottom end of the middle class structure.

What we are looking at here are many different ways to achieve a rebirth, a regeneration of the American manufacturing sector, and today we bring something that I think most people didn't expect when we talk about making it in America. They didn't expect us to be saying that if we are going to make it in America, if Americans are going to be able to make it, then we ought to look to the manufacturing sector, broadly defined, whether it is agriculture or, as we talked about last week in the manufacturing of high-speed rail, the manufacturing of trains and vehicles of all kinds.

So when your tax dollars are being spent, I would ask all of my colleagues and all of the public: Hey, are my tax dollars being spent on American-made goods and services, or are you buying foreign? That is a question for us to answer here and to write laws that encourage that your tax dollars will be spent on American-made goods and services. So we can make it in America. We can manufacture in America, and America can prosper as a result of the laws and the policies we put in place here.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Murphy).

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