releases: http://franken.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2649
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| http://franken.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2649 | In Senate Speech, Sen. Franken Pushes Ideas to Create Jobs and Strengthen Economy | 2013-12-19 | 2013 | 2013-12 | Democrat | House | MN | Al Franken | F000457 | franken.senate.gov | legacy | Today, U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) went to the Senate floor to deliver a speech laying out his plan to spur job creation and strengthen the economy for middle-class families in Minnesota and across the country. Sen. Franken homed in on three areas that he believes are key to economic prosperity: strengthening the country's manufacturing sector by closing the skills gap-where jobs go unfilled because businesses can't find workers with the right skills-increasing the minimum wage for working families, and extending long-term unemployment benefits. As part of his continued efforts to help create jobs, Sen. Franken has introduced legislation to bring businesses and community colleges together to fill high-skilled, open jobs in the manufacturing, information technology, and health care fields. "We have millions of open jobs that can't be filled because of a skills shortage. And we know that these partnerships are the most direct way to fill those jobs," said Sen. Franken in his speech. "So what I'm proposing is a competitive grant program in a bill called the Community College to Career Fund Act. Under this program, businesses and community colleges would apply for grants based on how many jobs their partnership would create, what the value of the jobs would be to those hired and to the community, and how much skin do the businesses have in the game." Sen. Franken highlighted his plan to fight for an increase to the minimum wage and pointed to how it would directly help Minnesota's economy. "The minimum wage is supposed to help guarantee that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will at least have a roof over your head and you'll be able to put food on the table," continued Sen Franken. "However, today, because the minimum wage is too low, it is not doing what is supposed to do...If we increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10, it will affect 462,000 Minnesota workers over three years-that's 18 percent of Minnesota's workforce. And it will increase our state's GDP by almost $400 million dollars. This is something we've got to fight for." Sen. Franken also explained that he will continue working to pass an extension for long-term unemployment benefits because the budget deal that passed the Senate yesterday did not include an extension. "65,000 workers in Minnesota and millions throughout our country may need this extended unemployment insurance in 2014-these are folks struggling to find jobs and support their families," said Sen. Franken. "And without an extension, the Council of Economic Advisors estimates that the economy will generate 240,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2014. That's why I've been working to continue the extension of unemployment insurance. And I will keep pushing for the Senate to take up and pass an extension when we return in the new year." Sen. Franken concluded his speech with a plea to his colleagues to put partisanship behind them and get back to the work they were sent here to do, saying, "Let's make this coming year the year that Congress works for Americans." You can read Sen. Franken's full speech below. As Prepared for Delivery STATEMENT ON THE SKILLS GAP, UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE AND THE MINIMUM WAGE SENATOR AL FRANKEN M. President, I rise today to speak about some of the important things we can be doing to help strengthen our economic recovery and to get more Minnesotans and more Americans across the country into jobs. During the government shutdown in October, I came to the floor to talk about how the shutdown was preventing us from doing the work the people sent us here to do. Every day we spent on the shutdown was a day we weren't working together to create jobs and rebuild the middle class. Well, the budget deal that we passed this week is far from perfect, but it is my hope that it will enable us to stop lurching from crisis to crisis and to focus on the work we were sent here to do. This agreement means that businesses will have the stability and certainty they need to create jobs and strengthen our economy. And it allows us to focus on educating our kids, creating a twenty-first-century workforce, and putting people back to work. Like I said, the budget deal is far from perfect. It's a compromise, and like any compromise, it has elements I like and elements I don't. In addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next two years, the budget deal undoes some of the extreme, across-the-board cuts of the sequester. That will enable us to make more of the critical investments we need to make in education, research and development, and infrastructure. And we will make those investments while replacing the irrational cuts of the sequester with more responsible deficit reduction. In fact, the bill ultimately reduces the deficit by about $20 billion more than under the previous budget that included the full sequester. At the same time, I'm very troubled by the fact that the bill pays for undoing some of the extreme, across-the-board cuts of the sequester in part by reducing some military pensions. That was something that was pushed by the lead Republican negotiator, and I'm not happy about it. I believe that there are cuts we can make to defense spending, but cutting military pensions isn't one of them. That's why I'm cosponsoring a bill with Senator Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire that would replace those cuts to military pensions by closing an indefensible and wasteful corporate tax loophole, and I hope we can get that done before the cut to military pensions goes into effect. I am also very troubled that the budget deal does not include an extension of critical emergency unemployment insurance. Extending this unemployment insurance is one of the things we need to be doing for our economy. Too many Americans remain unemployed. And those who have been unemployed the longest are facing the expiration of their unemployment insurance when they need it the most. 65,000 workers in Minnesota and millions throughout our country may need this extended unemployment insurance in 2014 - these are folks struggling to find jobs and support their families. Not extending unemployment insurance will also put the brakes on our economic recovery. In 2011, the CBO wrote that aid to the unemployed is among the policies with - quote - "the largest effects on output and employment per dollar of budgetary cost". And without an extension, the Council of Economic Advisors estimates that the economy will generate 240,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2014. That's why I've been working to continue the extension of unemployment insurance. And I will keep pushing for the Senate to take up and pass an extension when we return in the new year. Another thing we should do to strengthen the economy and help working Americans is to raise the minimum wage. We established the minimum wage because we believe that no one should work full-time, contributing to society, and live in poverty. Americans value work. We work more hours on average than citizens in other developed countries. The minimum wage is supposed to help guarantee that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will at least have a roof over your head and you'll be able to put food on the table. This year marks seventy-five years with a federal minimum wage. However, today, because the minimum wage is too low, it is not doing what is supposed to do. Today, a minimum wage worker making $7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 per year, falls below the poverty line - even though they work forty hours per week. And inflation has eroded the value of the minimum wage. If the minimum wage had simply kept pace with inflation since 1968 - not raised in real terms, but just kept pace with inflation - it would be $10.75 an hour today. That is a wage that would at least keep a family of three above the poverty line. What has happened to the minimum wage is part of a larger trend for American workers. Over the past 50 years, American workers have increased their productivity by 135 percent - 135 percent! - but the value of their wages has not changed. And the real value of the minimum wage has dropped by 33 percent. Over just the past few years, costs have climbed - Americans are paying more for electricity, rent, auto repair, food, and childcare, and many other things, and yet wages for most workers have stagnated, and the minimum wage has fallen. That's why I think that one of the most important ways we can boost our economy and help workers and families is to increase the minimum wage. And Americans agree. Americans strongly favor boosting the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. In a recent survey, 63 percent supported raising the minimum wage to $10.10 from the current $7.25 rate. Moreover, the support for increasing the minimum wage is broad-based - the rich, the poor, Republicans and Democrats all believe that we should raise the minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage will be good for Minnesota, and there is a parallel effort at the state level to increase the state minimum wage. If we increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10, it will affect 462,000 Minnesota workers over three years - that's 18 percent of Minnesota's workforce. And it will increase our state's GDP by almost $400 million dollars. This is something we've got to fight for. Extending unemployment benefits and increasing the minimum wage are crucial things that we can be doing to support the American value that if you work hard, you should be able to support yourself and your family. There is more that we can be doing. I am part of the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative that several of my colleagues in the Senate and I have undertaken. As part of that initiative, I want to talk about an issue I've spoken about on the floor before and that I hear about from manufacturers all over Minnesota: the skills gap. Now, what is the skills gap? Well, recent studies have shown that between one third and a half of manufacturers in my state have at least one job that they cannot fill because they can't find a worker with the right skills to fill that job. That is the skills gap in Minnesota. But it isn't just Minnesota - this is a nationwide phenomenon. A 2011 survey by Deloitte found that there were 600,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide that were unfilled because of a skills shortage. And it's not just manufacturers either. There's a skills gap in information technology, in health care, and in other sectors that have jobs sitting there waiting for skilled workers to fill them. There are more than 3 million jobs in this country that could be filled today if there were workers who had the right skills. With too many Americans unemployed, we have to find a way to fill those jobs. And the thing is, we know how to solve this. We're taking steps to solve it in communities in Minnesota and around the country through partnerships between businesses and community and technical colleges that are training up workers and getting them into high-demand jobs right away. Let me talk briefly about an innovative program to bridge the skills gap in Minnesota. I recently visited the Right Skills Now Program at the Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, and the South Central Community and Technical College in Mankato. At South Central, I sat with about eight to ten manufacturers, who had helped fund and design their program that gives workers the skills they need to operate a Computer Numerical Control, or CNC, machine. They told me that between them they had fifty job openings that they could fill that instant. At Dunwoody, their current placement rate from the Rights Skills Now Program is 91 percent. You'll have a hard time finding a more effective program. Dunwoody likes to emphasize that its students often come into the program having just been laid off, or that they're the long-term unemployed that we hear about. And after going through the program, they're placing 91 percent of them into good jobs in a growing industry. They told me about a student who had a successful career as a massage therapist, and he was doing just fine, until he began to experience pain from pre-arthritic symptoms. That spells trouble for a massage therapist. So he researched technical programs and joined Right Skills Now, and after going through the program, he re-launched his career as a machinist. Careers are different from what they were a generation ago. Very few people stay working in one job for one company for their entire life anymore. Whether it's because of changing life circumstances like the massage therapist-turned-machinist, or because of new technologies, most workers have many different jobs over the course of their working life now, and those jobs require many different skills. We need a workforce development system that is agile enough to keep up with those changing demands. That is essential not just so workers will able to get the different skills they will need over the course of their working lives - it's also going to be one of the keys to the United States remaining globally competitive. If our workers can't adapt to the new industries that are constantly forming, we will lose those jobs to our global competitors. There is no better way to anticipate and react to these changes than to connect businesses directly with our schools to get workers exactly what they need. This is also about college affordability. I've talked before about Erick Ajax, CEO of EJ Ajax and Sons, a metal stamping and sheet metal fabrication company in Fridley, Minnesota that was founded by Erick's grandfather in 1945. Erick and other manufacturers partnered with Hennepin Technical College in Hennepin County to set up M-Powered, a fast-track training program to get workers what they need for entry-level advanced manufacturing jobs. Erick gave me an example of one of his workers that I find so exciting - not because it's extraordinary, but because it's something that we can duplicate over and over again in this country. When he hires employees from these business-technical college partnerships, the way he looks at it is that they're on a career ladder that would otherwise not be available. He told me about one such hire, who was really good at this job. So Erick sent him back to school to get his associates degree. The guy came back to work, continued to be a star, and a few years later, Erick paid for him to go to the University of Minnesota, where he got his bachelor's degree. And the guy is now head of quality control for EJ Ajax, an incredibly high-skilled job at an advanced manufacturing company. Understand. This guy graduated from college with no debt. Zero debt. With a great job. When I think about college affordability, I think about that story. Now as I've said, we have a skills gap problem in manufacturing and other industries, and we have these partnerships that are successfully working to close that gap. So where do we come in, here in Congress? Well, I've gone around Minnesota to community and technical colleges and talked to businesses, and I've talked to national experts in our state and from around the country. And the fact is, we're just not doing this fast enough. And sometimes these partnerships could do a lot more, train up a lot more people, with some extra funding. Maybe to buy a really sophisticated machine. Or to hire an instructor with a very specialized skill. So what I'm proposing is a competitive grant program in a bill called the Community College to Career Fund Act. Under this program, businesses and community colleges would apply for grants based on how many jobs their partnership would create, what the value of the jobs would be to those hired and to the community, and how much skin do the businesses have in the game. We have millions of open jobs that can't be filled because of a skills shortage. And we know that these partnerships are the most direct way to fill those jobs. And we know that existing partnerships aren't doing enough and can't do enough, and they need more resources in order to truly meet the need that exists. So that's exactly what my bill would address. So as we move forward with this budget deal, let's build on the progress it represents and set our sights a little higher. Let's support working families and help people who are struggling to find a job in today's slowly recovering economy. Let's help students and young people who have been held back by slow job growth get a foothold in the economy; and let's support partnerships between businesses and community colleges to fill the jobs that are out there. Let's make this coming year the year that Congress works for Americans. | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |