Source: United States Senator for Ohio Sherrod Brown
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – In Case You Missed It: Yesterday, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) took to the Senate floor to applaud President Biden’s Executive Order to promote competition in the American economy, which will lower prices for families, increase wages for workers, and promote innovation and even faster economic growth.
“For the first time in decades, workers are beginning to gain some power in our economy,” said Brown on the Senate floor. “We invested in America’s greatest asset: our workers. We put money directly in Americans’ pockets, and that’s starting to unleash the true potential of our economy.”
Brown’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, can be found below:
For the first time in decades, workers are beginning to gain some power in our economy.
Because of President Biden’s leadership and because of the American Rescue Plan, America’s economy is roaring back.
We’ve had record job creation – we gained more than three million jobs since the President took office. That’s more jobs created in the first five months of any presidency in modern history.
And it’s not only the jobs numbers – those are important, but those alone don’t tell the full story. It’s also the quality of those jobs.
We’re starting to see signs of increased bargaining power for American workers – power to negotiate higher pay, safer working conditions, better benefits, more control over their schedules, opportunities for career advancement, all the things that turn jobs into good, stable, middle class careers.
I want to see employers competing for workers.
That’s a good thing – it’s how you get rising wages, which get spent in the community and create growth for everyone.
For decades, corporations have had all the power in our economy.
It’s going to take a lot of work to undo decades of bad trade and tax policy that gave corporations the upper hand.
But we are starting to see some glimmers of progress.
Wages are starting to go up – wages have been rising all year, and they’re surging for workers who’ve been paid too little for decades, working tough jobs in restaurants and hotels and other service jobs.
Last week the Washington Post declared, “Welcome to the year of wage hikes.”
They reported that, “In the past three months, rank-and-file employees have seen some of the fastest wage growth since the early 1980s.”
Think about that – the fastest wage growth since Ronald Reagan said it was “morning in America.”
That’s what happens when you invest in the people who make this country work – not the CEOs, not multinational corporations. That money never trickles down.
We invested in America’s greatest asset: our workers. We put money directly in Americans’ pockets, and that’s starting to unleash the true potential of our economy.
We are not stopping here.
On Friday President Biden issued a sweeping executive order to increase competition in the economy – it’s one more way we can start to tilt the job market toward workers.
Capitalism without competition is just exploitation.
It’s just common sense – when you have a tiny number of corporations that control entire industries and huge portions of the economy, it drives up prices and drives down wages.
Research shows that industry consolidation is decreasing worker pay by as much as 17 percent.
Companies force workers to sign non-compete agreements as a condition of getting a job, even in jobs like fast food and construction.
They tuck them into the fine print of job contracts, making it harder for them to switch to better-paying options.
Sometimes they’re not even enforceable, but employers put them in there anyway because they know it scares workers away from taking another job with a competitor offering higher wages.
We’re putting a stop to this. No company should be allowed to tell you that you can’t take a job offering higher pay.
President Biden is also cracking down on corporate mergers.
Towns all over Ohio have seen what happens when companies merge and create just one employer in a community.
It often means plant or store closures, and it means workers have no competitors in town to go in order to look for higher wages.
Rural towns in Ohio and across the country watch companies come in, knowing they are the only game in town, and they offer workers a take-it-or-leave-it offer at rock-bottom wages that won’t even pay the bills.
Sometimes that’s the whole point of the merger – to cut what corporations call “labor costs,” and what the rest of us call “jobs and paychecks.”
Now, the president is making it clear: when we review mergers, we need to look at and take into account whether they will lead to lower wages for workers.
All our actions come back to the same goal: increasing worker power by cutting through the red tape that keeps workers’ wages down.
We need to build on this progress and these important steps by passing the PRO Act – the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
To have a strong, growing middle class, we have to have strong unions.
The PRO Act would start to level the playing field, and finally give workers a fighting chance against corporate union-busting tactics.
We all saw what happened with Amazon this year.
Amazon is one of the most powerful corporations in the world, and would not be raking in profits without the hard work and dedication of its hundreds of thousands of American workers.
Yet Amazon unleashed all of that power to fight its own workers.
When workers try to organize, it’s NEVER a fair fight.
It would strengthen the punishments against companies that violate workers’ right to organize, and that retaliate against union organizers.
And it would close loopholes that allow employers to misclassify their employees as supervisors and independent contractors, to avoid paying their fair share and giving workers the benefits they deserve.
A union card is a ticket to a middle class life.
We just need corporations to let workers organize, and take control over their careers and their futures.
I was at Spangler candy company in Bryan, Ohio, a few weeks ago – it’s family-owned business, more than a century old. And they have had that success for all those years by treating their workers and their union as partners.
They all have the same goal – to make a great product, to make the company successful. And they work together.
We saved their union pensions in the Rescue Plan, and now it’s allowing the company to expand production and 40 more good union jobs
That’s what we can achieve when we invest in the people and the places this country work.
When you love this country you fight for the people who make it work.
That’s what President Biden is doing, and it’s what all of us must continue to do, until ALL hard work pays off, and workers finally have some real power in this country.
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