Philips Lighting Factory Closing

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. Speaker, earlier this year, I stood in Fall River, Massachusetts, and told our country the story of that proud and resilient city.

Today, for nearly 200 working families, that resilience is being tested because, this week, after celebrating $342 million in profits, Philips Lighting announced that they would be closing their factory in Fall River and moving those jobs to Mexico. Almost 200 loyal, lifelong employees are left behind, careers upended, savings lost. Mortgages, healthcare bills, tuition payments will be missed.

For the 61-year-old worker who is near retirement and paying off his daughter's student loans, a meager investment in workforce retraining is not worth all that much.

For the countless workers who sit around dining room tables in southeastern Massachusetts tonight trying to figure out how their family budget can absorb impossible cuts, bland lip service given by this White House yesterday means nothing.

But that is not even the whole story. Philips Lighting shareholders are being showered with $187.4 million in stock buybacks because of Donald Trump's tax plan.

Make no mistake, that is the legacy of this tax bill: working families that are left sorting through the wreckage while CEOs bask in windfalls; lights turned off on empty American factory floors while shareholders grin around boardroom tables; success somehow defined in dividends and return on investment rather than in jobs, in paychecks, in families supported, retirements earned, and dreams realized.

Yes, Fall River is a unique city, but across this country, other families and communities find themselves in the same impossible place as economic afterthoughts in a Republican economy increasingly tilted towards the privileged and the powerful with a government that refuses to hear their voices.

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