U.S. Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania pledged to continue his lifelong commitment to and support for working families during an address to a capacity crowd of mostly union workers at the Carpenters Pittsburgh Training Center.
Casey’s June 30 address was both a celebration of recent victories the senator has helped to achieve on behalf of workers, and a call to action to keep up the fight.
“It’s no coincidence that I chose the Steel City for this event,” Casey said. “You invented your own economic future. Together, we have an opportunity to take control of our economic future, but we need to invest in our workers to do that.”
The Biden administration, with help from the Democratic majority in the Senate, has already made significant progress on those investments, with the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Together, Casey said, those three laws are projected to create more than 500,000 jobs over the next decade in Pennsylvania alone, along with millions more across the rest of the country.
“We are going to build the future here in America, with union labor and American manufacturing,” the senator said. “It means good jobs for American workers for decades to come.”
District 10 Director Bernie Hall, in introducing the senator to a crowd that included several dozen USW members, touted the Casey family’s roots in coal mining and the senator’s lifelong fight for higher wages, quality health care and secure retirements as evidence of his commitment.
“Pennsylvania’s workers could not have a better friend in Washington than Senator Casey,” Hall said. “He stands up for us.”
Still, Casey said, there is much more work to be done. Congress must pass additional measures to modernize outdated trade laws and confront China’s economic aggression, to ensure “Buy American” rules, and to protect workers’ rights, to make sure that workers will be at the center of the nation’s economic future.
“Giving power to workers,” he said, by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, would be a big step in the right direction.
“We have to become a new kind of manufacturing powerhouse,” Casey said.