Ron Johnson defends outsourced jobs: ‘I don’t think we should bring everything back’
Wednesday night during a tele-town hall, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) said that he doesn’t believe bringing back “high-labor content products” and manufacturing jobs should be a legislative priority.
Johnson made the comments after taking a call from a Milwaukee resident asking what the senator would do to bring back American manufacturing jobs, complaining about a lack of American goods and “cheap, Chinese-made dollar stores” in his area.
“In my position, you see this all the time traveling around not only Wisconsin but the country, nobody can hire enough people,” Johnson said. “So, we are going to have a long-term worker shortage. So, bringing back high-labor content products doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
A constituent asks Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) about bringing back American manufacturing.
RJ: “Nobody can hire enough people… bringing back high-labor content products doesn’t make sense.”
“Only purchasing things made in America… I don’t think we should bring everything back.” pic.twitter.com/YJIlEeKkER
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) June 9, 2022
Johnson said some “strategic products” like microchips and pharmaceutical ingredients should be made domestically but that the U.S. needs to work with the global economy when it can. He also believes that the current federal government hasn’t managed the global economy “very well.”
“But bringing only purchasing things made in America really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Again, economics are very complicated, but I don’t think we should bring everything back but we absolutely need to bring back a number of very strategic products.”
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin condemned Johnson’s statements.
“It comes as no surprise that the same self-serving Ron Johnson who refused to fight to bring more than a thousand good paying jobs to his hometown in Wisconsin thinks ‘it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense’ to purchase things made in America”, said Philip Shulman, the DPW’s Senate communications advisor. “This is just another example of Ron Johnson putting his self-serving agenda ahead of Wisconsin’s workers and families.”
Companies based in the United States have been outsourcing labor jobs overseas for decades to cut costs. Most notably are tech companies like Apple, whose products are made almost entirely in China. According to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute in 2020, nearly 1,800 manufacturing factories in the United States were shut down between 2016-2018. The COVID-19 outbreak combined with offshoring saw 740,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs lost in 2020 alone.
Johnson is running for a third term in the U.S. Senate later this year and is campaigning on the issues of growing the economy and creating jobs. Several Democratic candidates are on the ballot for the Wisconsin primary election on August 9th.
