Jan Schakowsky Quotes

Not only must we fight to end disastrous unfettered free trade agreements with China, Mexico, and other low wage countries, we must fight to fundamentally rewrite our trade agreements so that American products, not jobs, are our number one export.

I'm not opposed to free trade if it's fair trade. But I am opposed to bad trade deals.

In May 2007, congressional Democrats and the Bush administration agreed to a plan to include environmental and international labor standards in upcoming trade agreements.

In all free trade agreements there are winners and losers.

I do think we need to hold countries accountable who violate trade agreements that are already in place. We need to get stronger about enforcement, that in the future if we strike a trade agreement, toughening up labor standards and environmental standards and enforcement standards is something we absolutely need to do.

If we're going to do trade agreements, as we should, we need trade agreements with rules that will lift up all boats, rather than continuing to pull down U.S. food safety standards, U.S. worker wages, environment, all that these job losses and all that this has done to pull down our standards.

Our trade negotiations should ensure that American workers are protected and that there are mechanisms in place to deal with other countries cheating.

It's very personal to me that we get these trade deals right.

The American consumer is also the American worker, and if we don't do something to protect our manufacturing base here at home, it is going to be hard to buy any retail goods.

But, we have had the debate in our country now for a number of years as to whether or not free trade agreements are good for economic growth and economic opportunity in creating jobs and lifting people out of poverty.

We are on pace this year to have a trade deficit that is larger than $800 billion. We have never faced that before, but we continue to put forward trade agreements like these that leave us naked to competition that is neither free nor fair.

I intend to be vehement in my enforcement of the [foreign trade] laws. We've got to stop getting rolled.

The closest we can come to free trade is illuminating the barriers to free trade.

Unfair foreign trade practices are not isolated acts.

It's not just free trade verses protectionism any longer, you've got the concepts of managed trade and reciprocity, and environmental issues.

We could not get NAFTA passed today with the current Congress…. We’ve got to combine trade liberalization with a broad-based sharing of the fruits of our productivity.

There is nothing inconsistent between standing up for free trade and standing up for American workers.

The Nordic governments have adopted a market-friendly approach to regulation. Although they maintain regulations to protect workers, consumers and the environment, they balance those protections with a system that encourages entrepreneurship and flexibility by making it easy to start or close a business, to hire or fire employees, and to adjust work hours.

It is the system now called free trade that tends to the destruction of commerce, as is shown wherever it obtains.

A lot of people believe, and I do at times, that some of our trade agreements are lopsided, and we've got to look at them. But that doesn't mean that we're going to put a tariff on everything.

We'll be aggressive on trade because we know that deals that have been made historically have resulted in the great loss of manufacturing jobs, a great amount of closed manufacturing businesses. We don't want that to continue.

Most Republicans and the business community extol the virtues of trade, depicting it as an engine of economic progress, while most Democrats and unions attack the exportation of American jobs, claiming that trade agreements are destroying our economy.

For our part, the U.S. government has an obligation to aggressively pursue every opportunity to expand trade, boost the economy, and create well-paid jobs here at home.

Unfettered free trade has led to a disaster.

Regulation is necessary to protect our natural environment, keep our food and medicine safe, and ensure fair competition and fair treatment of our workers.