mr. speaker , i yield myself such time as i may consume .  the two speakers prior to me have raised the question of outsourcing , and other people have challenged the relevancy of that topic to this particular set of bills .  every statement i read from industry complaining about the competitive edge that other nations have mentioned the fact that our environmental laws and our safety laws and our minimum wage , that combination , puts them at a disadvantage .  so it is logical to conclude that part of the exercise today is to take away one of those disadvantages , to the degree it can be accomplished .  and if you have to chip away at it with bills like this and remove worker safety as an expense that has to be undertaken .  this civilized nation was built by workers and the workers deserve to have a fair break .  but those that want to reduce us to the level of third world nations or want to imitate china are going to pursue the kinds of bills that we have before us today .  so i want to just conclude with another section from the report of the afl-cio , their annual report on worker safety .  i just want to read a few excerpts , which i think are excerpts that are important to educate our members .  more than 306 , 706 workers can now say their lives have been saved since the passage of the osha act in 1970 .  unfortunately , too many workers remain at risk .  on average , 15 workers were fatally injured and more than 12 , 000 workers were injured or made ill each day of 2003 .  these statistics do not include deaths from occupational diseases , which claim the lives of an estimated 50 , 000 to 60 , 000 workers each year .  according to the bureau of labor statistics , there were 5 , 559 workplace deaths due to traumatic injuries in 2003 , which was a slight increase from the number of deaths in 2002 , when 5 , 534 workplace deaths were reported .  wyoming , of all places , led the country with the highest fatality rate , 13.9 people per 100 , 000 .  the lowest state for the fatality rate was 1.5 per 100 , 000 , which was reported in delaware .  the construction sector had the largest , as i said before , the construction sector had the largest number of fatal work injuries , 1 , 126 in 2003 ; followed by transportation and warehousing , which had 805 injuries ; and agriculture , forestry , fishing and hunting , which had 707 injuries .  industry sectors with the highest fatality rates were agriculture , forestry , fishing , and hunting , 31.2 per 100 , 000 in hunting .  mining had 26.9 per 100 , 000 .  and transportation and warehousing , 17.5 per 100 , 000 .  so you can see we are not here just to talk in support of the blue states , the urban states , the rust belt states ; but the rural areas are suffering quite a bit also .  the workers there -- the rural areas -- suffer in terms of the large number of fatalities in the workplace .  transportation and material-moving occupations had the highest number of fatalities , 1 , 388 , followed by construction and extraction occupations , with 1 , 033 fatal injuries .  the occupations of greatest risk of work-related fatalities based on the number of fatalities per 100 , 000 employed were logging workers .  their occupation had 131.6 fatalities per 100 , 000 ; fishers and related fishing occupations had 115 deaths per 100 , 000 ; and aircraft pilots and flight engineers , 97.4 deaths per 100 , 000 employed .  very interesting that simple guys out there , fishers and logging workers , are in the same category as aircraft test pilots and flight engineers in terms of deaths and injuries .  so our concern is universal , and the mission of osha is important and should not be denigrated or trivialized by this kind of legislation .  