Tim Kaine talks jobs in Daytona Beach, full speech transcript
Point three is shared prosperity. Hillary’s dad in their family business and my dad in our family business, there was shared prosperity. There was an owner, there were the workers. In my dad’s case, it was management and labor – ironworkers – but we didn’t view this as a fight. We didn’t view this as us against them. The ironworkers asked my dad, even though the business was really coming tiny, to be on the National Pension Fund Board, one of three employer reps on that board. He only had seven employees. But they said you’ve got a reputation for treating your workers fairly, so come be on the Pension Fund Board to make sure that our workers have a dignified retirement. And that’s what the shared prosperity model ought to be. We ought to have means of profit-sharing, for example, in businesses, make it easier for businesses to share profits with their employees. So as businesses succeed, it’s not just the CEO taking it all himself, it’s shared among all the workers and we can do that. We can do that.
We’re going to make it – we’re going to uphold the power of labor. I mean, labor has played such a constructive force in this country and we want to make sure that we can uphold the power of labor to organize and bargain collectively and advance working conditions and living conditions and wages and health care benefits, and so we will work seriously on that, and then we’ll do this: We’re not going to use tax breaks to reward companies that are taking jobs elsewhere. We have a tax code now – we have a tax code now that will let you deduct the expenses of moving jobs out of the United States as if it’s just an ordinary business expense. Hey, that’s not going to be ordinary under a Clinton Administration. If somebody gets a lot of tax breaks and then they move their jobs overseas, then there will be an exit tax that you’ll have to pay back what they got, and hopefully, that will make some of them decide to stay. We don’t want to reward exiting companies, we want to reward patriot companies, and that’s what Hillary Clinton will do as president. So that’s point three.