Brown to introduce bill requiring purchase of American-made goods

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown will introduce a bill in the Senate to require the purchase of textiles and apparel by federal agencies to be American made.

The Wear American Act of 2012 would change a current law requiring 51 percent of those purchases to be made in the United States to be 100 percent, said Brown, a Democrat from Avon.

The bill provides flexibility to federal agencies if such textiles and apparel are either not sufficient or not available for production in the United States.

“With our widening trade deficit, we should be doing everything we can to support American manufacturing and job creation,” Brown said.

Brown unveiled the proposal Monday during a press conference at Youngstown Nation, a downtown Youngstown business that specializes in American- and Ohio-made products.

“For too long, we’ve seen American manufacturing jobs, including textile and apparel jobs, shipped overseas due to unfair trade that has stacked the deck against American workers,” Brown said. “We know how to make things in America, and the textile sector employs more than half a million workers in the United States, which is why the federal government should be purchasing, whenever possible, apparel that is domestically produced.”