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I find it interesting when we are talking about a program to try and provide technical assistance to some of the poorest nations and some of the poorest people on Earth that the gentleman would come down and make a case for giving 2 percent of the richest people maybe on the face of the Earth a tax cut worth almost $400 billion. But that is why we do not have the money to deal with this program, because they have already made their decisions.
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It is not the gentleman from Illinois' (Mr. PORTER) problem. His problem is the money that the leadership gave him because they took most of the money for their tax cuts, tax cuts that have been rejected by the American public time and again because the American public understands there is an agenda that has to be dealt with by this Congress and by this Nation of securing Social Security, securing Medicare and paying down the debt, taking care of the education of our children. But they refuse to do that. So this appropriation bill comes to the floor with inadequate resources.
Let us talk a little bit about the gentleman's amendment. This is an effort to continue to provide technical assistance to the ILO against child labor. These are efforts that have been successful. The gentleman talked about the effort in the soccer ball where before young children were given soccer balls to sew because theoretically they had flexible small hands and they could sew those soccer balls. They did it until such time as their hands were crippled. Then they were released from those jobs. They could not really go to work, and they had never been to school.
Led by the Secretary of Labor, Senator HARKIN, myself, and others, we brought the manufacturers of soccer balls together along with the ILO, along with various countries and those manufacturing processes were brought in-house. They were brought in-house and adults were given those jobs and children were sent to school and schools were built so that children could participate in an education and their parents could earn enough money.
Now when American children play soccer in this country, they know that the soccer balls are not made by the misery of child labor in foreign countries. That model can be replicated and is being replicated time and again, but it needs assistance to do that. That was part of the debate about globalization that we went through last week, about whether or not American workers are going to have to compete against these kinds of unfair labor practices and whether or not it is just enough for America to say send us anything as long as you can keep the costs down and you do it through human misery.
That is not what the American people want. They have said time and again they want child labor reduced, they do not want to buy articles of clothing, sporting goods, and other commodities that are made with child labor. This is an effort. The administration made the request, and the request could not be met. Not because this committee did not want to do it, because the priorities were set earlier in the year with the $1 trillion tax cut.
What we are going to see time and again is appropriations bills come to this floor, the priorities of this Nation are not being met because of that tax cut. The interruption that took place earlier today to report the rule for the repeal of the estate tax is just part of that package. They could not pass the whole package, so now they are going to separate it into pieces. But that is going to address 2 percent of the wealthiest people in this country.
It is going to cost us almost $400 billion over 10 years, and it is very hard to do justice if you do not have the money to try to help people who are far less fortunate than we are so that they can have a good life for their families, their children can go to school, and they can start to aspire to the same kind of dreams that we want for our children.
I thank the gentleman for offering the amendment.
[Time: 18:30]
POINT OF ORDER
Mr. PORTER. Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order against the amendment because it is in violation of section 302(f) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. The Committee on Appropriations filed a sub-allocation of budget totals for fiscal year 2001 on June 7, 2000, House report 106-656. This amendment would provide new budget authority in excess of the subcommittee's sub-allocation made under section 302(b) and is not permitted under section 302(f) of the act. I ask for a ruling of the Chair.
The CHAIRMAN. Does the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. OBEY) wish to be heard on the point of order against his amendment?
Mr. OBEY. Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman. I would simply say that given the fact that the rule under which this bill is being considered guarantees that at all costs that tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent of people in this society will come before the needs of everybody else, I reluctantly agree that because of that rule, the gentleman is technically correct, and the amendment, while correct and just, is not in order under the Rules of the House.
The CHAIRMAN. The Chair is authoritatively guided by the estimate of the Committee on the Budget, pursuant to section 312(a) of the Budget Act, that an amendment providing a net increase in new discretionary budget authority greater than $1 million would cause a breach of the pertinent allocation of such authority.
The amendment offered by the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. OBEY), on its face, proposes to increase the level of new discretionary budget authority in the bill by greater than $1 million. As such, the amendment would violate section 302(f) of the Budget Act.
The point of order is sustained, and the amendment is not in order.
The CHAIRMAN. The Clerk will read.
The Clerk read as follows:
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR VETERANS EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING
Not to exceed $184,341,000 may be derived from the Employment Security Administration account in the Unemployment Trust Fund to carry out the provisions of 38 U.S.C. 4100-4110A, 4212, 4214, and 4321-4327, and Public Law 103-353, and which shall be available for obligation by the States through December 31, 2001. To carry out the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act and section 168 of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, $16,936,000, of which $7,300,000 shall be available for obligation for the period July 1, 2001, through June 30, 2002.
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
For salaries and expenses of the Office of Inspector General in carrying out the provisions of the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended, $48,095,000, together with not to exceed $3,830,000, which may be expended from the Employment Security Administration account in the Unemployment Trust Fund.
GENERAL PROVISIONS
SEC. 101. None of the funds appropriated in this title for the Job Corps shall be used to pay the compensation of an individual, either as direct costs or any proration as an indirect cost, at a rate in excess of Executive Level II.
(TRANSFER OF FUNDS)
SEC. 102. Not to exceed 1 percent of any discretionary funds (pursuant to the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, as amended) which are appropriated for the current fiscal year for the Department of Labor in this Act may be transferred between appropriations, but no such appropriation shall be increased by more than 3 percent by any such transfer: Provided, That the Appropriations Committees of both Houses of Congress are notified at least 15 days in advance of any transfer.
SEC. 103. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection.
AMENDMENT OFFERED BY MR. TRAFICANT
Mr. TRAFICANT. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.
The Clerk read as follows:
Amendment offered by Mr. TRAFICANT:
Page 19, strike lines 15 through 19 (section 103).
Mr. TRAFICANT. Mr. Chairman, section 103 reads, ``None of the funds made available in this act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed temporary or final standard on ergonomic protection.''
The Traficant-Weldon amendment would simply strike the provision, and it would prevent OSHA from going forward with its proposed rule, requiring employers to come up with basic programs to prevent repetitive motion injuries.
Last August the House passed H.R. 987, the Workplace Preservation Act, to have OSHA wait until another study is complete to implement the standards. For the record, I voted against the bill. Now, this bill overrides the wait provision and tells OSHA that it cannot set those standards.
We have many American workers, and I know what the complaints are, that some of these workers are taking advantage in the workplace of some of these musculoskeletal problems where, through repetitive work in industry, they develop these musculoskeletal problems and muscular problems that prevent them from working.
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By striking the language, very simply, we would affect, in my opinion, 650,000 workers in the positive. We have an opportunity to pass a very straightforward amendment. Some employers have had experience with these programs in meat packing, foot wear facilities that have seen significant reductions in these disorders, and I think today we should guarantee that other industries and employers see the same reduction in injuries and see fewer missed days of work.
It does not seem like a tough job being a cashier, or nurses in nursing homes, or court reporters who sit with their fingers constantly moving and their hands subject to, over a period of years, much wear and tear, and that is not even getting to the point of those workers in manufacturing and assembly plants who, on a very repetitive motion, are bringing about certain heavy industrial tools and machinery.
So without a doubt, I think in the best interest, certainly to serve the working community, and I think in the best interest of Congress, I think we should strike section 103. I think it is the right thing to do. By doing so, I think we would help many American workers.
Mrs. NORTHUP. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
Mr. Chairman, I recognize and agree with the concerns of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. TRAFICANT) who is offering this amendment. I believe that we are all worried about healthy workers, about workers who are important to this economy, they are important to their families, their income is important to their community and their family. This is an issue that is very important.
The problem is that the Department of Labor has been absolutely tone deaf in developing this rule. They have had all of these years they have been talking about to develop a rule. There are many people that wish to come to the table and work on this issue. The fact is, in workplaces all across America we have employers, we have cities, we have States, we have hospitals, nursing homes, teachers, every single place across this country, people are looking for workers. It is in all of our best interests to keep our workers healthy and on the job.
But the fact is that the Department of Labor has written a rule that is absolutely unacceptable. It does not at all bring all of the people concerned about this to the table and help work out a reasonable rule. It has put all of the costs on the employer, and it is not just businesses that are terribly concerned about this, it is schools; the school districts are talking about being absolutely unable to comply because of the cost. Nursing homes, hospitals, States, cities, the League of Cities. We all know that is not some conservative organization. They are saying that this rule is written in a way that they simply could not, could not comply with this.
Mr. Chairman, it threatens the solvency of our workers' compensation program because it overrides current workers compensation programs that have worked so well in our States; and instead it provides an extraordinary level of reimbursement for our workers who would need time off because of repetitive motion injuries.
The problem here is one of fairness. It is simply not fair to have two workers that work side by side, one that is truly injured, completely and totally on the job, to get one level of reimbursement and a worker who is off because of a repetitive motion that may be partly his job, partly what he does outside of his job, partly what happened before he came to this workplace, getting an extraordinary level of benefits. It places all of the responsibility on the employer. It has no regard to preexisting condition or what is done outside.
The fact is, Mr. Chairman, we need to work on ergonomics rules in total. What ergonomics are, are people that start to have injuries. Those of us over 50 probably do not have a friend that does not have an elbow, a shoulder, a neck, a backache, something that is a repetitive motion problem. Is it exacerbated in the workplace? Sometimes it is. So that is a component of it. But it also may be aggravated by what happens outside of the workplace.
So what this rule does not do is recognize the outside of the workplace being part of the cause and what has to be addressed.
In truth, what this bill does is chase our best jobs out of this country. It begins to make Mexico and Canada look like great places to put one's next plant or any expansion that one does, so that one can have a reasonable workplace where one can work with one's workers, work to address their concerns, and not absorb enormous costs that are open-ended. It discriminates against older workers, because I hate to say, it does not take long for somebody to figure out that somebody like me in my 50s is more likely to have a joint or a backache or a carpal tunnel problem than it is for a 24-year-old.
So if one is an employer and one knows that they have to keep spending money until this person's problem goes away, one can figure out that it is better to hire 23-year-olds than it is 53-year-olds.
The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. TRAFICANT) is exactly right. Companies are spending millions of dollars right now. They are doing everything they possibly can to reengineer the workplace, to trade and rotate jobs, to address their employees' needs. But it makes no sense to enact a rule or to let the Department of Labor go on with a rule that is so one-sided and does not really bring us solutions.
In closing, Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out that there is one workplace that the OSHA rule would not apply, and that is the one workplace that the Federal Government has total control over. Federal employees would not be covered by this rule. It is not enforceable in Federal workplaces, and so they would be the one group that would be exempted.
Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.
Mr. Chairman, I rise to join with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. TRAFICANT), my friend and colleague, in offering this amendment and rise to express my concerns about the status of some of America's workers. I agree with the gentlewoman that we should have a great deal of concern about jobs going away from America. In fact, that is why I opposed NAFTA. I think if we look at the results of the implications of NAFTA, we would find that many of America's manufacturing jobs have, in fact, gone to Mexico and Canada and have left the U.S.
But I want to talk about this issue in particular, and I do not rise in a vacuum. Mr. Chairman, before coming to Congress, I was an educator, and one of the assignments that I had as an educator was to run the corporate training department for a very large insurance company, the Insurance Company of North America, which later became known as the Cigna Corporation. My job at that corporation was to train their workers' comp specialists, and we had some 700 of them that worked with companies across the country.
Mr. Chairman, during that experience, what I saw time and time again among our insureds were examples of workers suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and suffering from problems associated with workplaces that were not properly considering the atmosphere of the worker, the conditions of the worker, the ergonomics of the workplace environment.
Now, the rightful response by industry should have been, and in some cases has been, an effort to redesign the workplace, to make the job more conducive to the human body. Unfortunately, that has not always occurred.
What OSHA has proposed to do is to set up some standards that, in fact, would allow that to happen. We can argue for and against the fairness, but I think the bottom line in my opinion is we have to very strongly say as a Congress that this issue of ergonomics must be addressed, and I think it is appropriate that it be addressed and supported by Members of both sides of the aisle.
[Time: 18:45]
If we look at the history of this issue in both the House and Senate, there have been a number of hearings on ergonomics and on the issues associated with it.
In fact, it is interesting to me, Mr. Chairman, that in the fiscal year 1998 Labor-HHS appropriations bill, OSHA
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So here we had in the 1998 bill language that basically said we would not move to restrict these kinds of guidelines in the future. There is a feeling there have been enough studies on the subject, Mr. Chairman, including a 1998 study by the Academy of Sciences, a critical review by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and over 2,000 scientific articles on ergonomics. It is a major problem and is causing severe problems for our constituents across the country.
In fact, Mr. Chairman, in August of 1999, the full House passed H.R. 987, which would deny funding for the ergonomics rule until the National Academy of Sciences completed its study on the proposal. This bill basically precludes the need to take the action that is included in this appropriation measure.
In fact, the most interesting part of this whole debate, Mr. Chairman, is where this idea first originated for an ergonomics standard. It did not originate under Bill Clinton. An ergonomics standard within OSHA was first proposed by Labor Secretary Libby Dole under the Bush administration. Granted, it may not be the standard we are looking at today, but the idea of moving toward an ergonomic standard is one based in the tradition of both parties.
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