The Trans-Pacific Partnership

Floor Speech

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Mr. KILDEE. First of all, thank you to my colleague, Mr. Pocan, for
his leadership on this and for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, this is a really important subject for the American
people. It is a really important subject for the people that I
represent in Flint, Michigan, in Saginaw, Michigan, Bay City.

You mentioned Flint. It is my hometown. I was born and raised there.
September 16, 1908, General Motors was incorporated in Flint, Michigan,
and it was a company that brought together carriage-makers and wheel-
makers, and they put the world on wheels.

About 30 years later, the workers in that city at General Motors
organized and got the first UAW contract. Between the auto industry
itself and the organized workers who were able to then claim their fair
share of the tremendous wealth generated by their productive capacity,
we built the American middle class. We built an amazing society that
gives opportunity, gave opportunity, I think, to just about anybody who
felt they could work hard and would put in the time and get a fair wage
and get decent benefits and be able to go to work with some dignity.

We built something that was truly amazing.

It was not that long ago, because of globalization and because of
trade deals like the one that is being considered right now, that the
Federal Government, rightfully, and this President, rightfully, stood
up for the American auto industry and put it back on its feet. They
gave the American autoworker--the American worker--the chance to
reclaim that dignity that so many people fought for even decades ago.

What I worry about is that everything that those people worked and
fought for could go away. In fact, even the great work that this
President did to rescue the American auto industry could all be for
naught if we continue down this path of pursuing trade policy that puts
corporate and stockholder and offshore interests, really, in front of
the interests of the American people and the American worker.

My hometown has seen this play itself out. I remember--I was in local
government--when the North American Free Trade Agreement was adopted.
We keep hearing that the agreement that is being contemplated right now
is a vastly different sort of agreement, but we don't see that. What we
do hear and see is the very same language and the very same rhetoric
and the very same explanations or excuses about the need to grant Fast
Track authority to negotiate this agreement and bring it back to
Congress for a ``yes'' or ``no'' vote. The same arguments that are
being made now were being made then, and the people whom I represent
truly believed that they were sold a bill of goods.

At one point in time, in my hometown of Flint, Michigan, we had
79,000 autoworkers. This was a city that was never more than 200,000 in
population, so this is a city that really grew up around American
manufacturing. It was direct GM employees, but it was suppliers and a
whole community built around this incredible productive capacity that
started over a century ago; but in just a few short years, we have gone
from that 79,000 number to about 10,000 autoworkers in my hometown.

When I think about trade and these trade deals, it is not a question
of sort of the big geopolitical tensions that we are trying to address.
It is not even a matter of this kind of esoteric argument about the
philosophy of trade policy. It is about Flint and Saginaw and Bay City,
Michigan, families who have worked hard their whole lives and who stand
to lose everything because we are continuing to pursue trade policy
that thinks about the short-term profits of multinational corporations
and not about strengthening the long-term integrity of the American
middle class. This is a dangerous path that we are on.

What is particularly concerning to me is that, when I go home, as I
do--as you all do--we get questions about this.

The questions are: ``We keep hearing that this trade agreement will
have a high standard, a high set of standards, and that it will not be
like past agreements.'' Even some here in Washington have said that we
are fighting old battles and that this is a new day. Yet, when I have
to answer to my constituents' questions like: ``Will these agreements
have environmental protections and enforcement mechanisms for those
environmental standards unlike some previous agreements?'' I have to
say, ``I don't really know because we don't have access to the
documents. We don't have access to the process. We haven't been asked
to weigh in.''

``Will the agreements have labor standards that guarantee that
American workers won't have to compete with nations that outlaw labor
unions?'' for example.

``I don't know because we have not seen that language.''
We are being asked to accept on faith that, somehow, miraculously,
this trade agreement is going to look dramatically different than
others, even of those that have been fairly recently passed.

Finally, I am asked, ``Will there be protections to keep other
nations from manipulating their currency?'' No matter what else is in
any of these trade agreements, if currency can be manipulated to a
point so that the price of one nation's exports makes it impossible for
us to compete with them, all is lost.

From what we hear, there will be no currency provisions or at least,
if there are any at all, they certainly won't be strong enough to have
any influence whatsoever on the ability of these nations to undermine
the American economy by dumping goods, by manipulating currency in a
fashion that makes it impossible for us to compete.

This is the wrong track for this country. It is something for which
Congress needs to stand up and assert its constitutional role in
defending. I stand with my colleagues, and I know many, many others who
simply are not going to sit idly by no matter who the President is--a
Democrat, a Republican, or otherwise--and allow the prerogatives of
Congress, which means the prerogatives of the people who sent us here,
to be overlooked. It would be a dangerous path for us to take, and I am
very grateful to my friend Mr. Pocan for his leadership and for the
leadership of many others here on this issue.

I am glad to stand with you in fighting this battle

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