VIDEO: Portman Visits Honda Heritage Center, Highlights Tax Credit To Help Businesses Safely Reopen

In a new video, Senator Portman discusses his visit to the Honda Heritage Center where he met with Honda’s leadership and employees to discuss Honda’s efforts to help support the COVID-19 response, including production of face shields and compressor parts for ventilators. 

Portman also discussed his Healthy Workplaces Tax Credit Act - bipartisan legislation to help businesses continue to safely reopen while ensuring the safety of employees and consumers through a refundable tax credit against payroll taxes for 50 percent of the costs incurred by a business for increased testing, personal protective equipment, disinfecting, extra cleaning and reconfiguring work spaces to adhere to social distancing guidelines. The legislation was included in Majority Leader McConnell’s proposed COVID-19 response package. 

A transcript of the video can be found below and the video can be found here. 

“Great tour at Honda today. Honda is the number one auto manufacturer in terms of jobs in Ohio. They are doing a couple of things which are really commendable. One is, in their own internal operations,  they are taking a lot of steps to keep it safe. So they have a strict policy on separation, on social distancing, on masks and hand sanitizer, and so on. They have been able to make the workplace safe. My legislation would help all companies to be able to do that - called the Safe Workplace Act. We talked about that and how that would be helpful. They also are involved in producing PPE. So they’ve made face shields, they have made the hand sanitizer, and right now they are engaged in - and have been for a few months - in making compressors that go into ventilators. So they’ve got 100 people working full time on producing the most important part of a ventilator, which is the compressor, the air compressor. They’ve been able to produce these very quickly and very efficiently, and I appreciate the fact that they stepped up and took some of their auto workers off the line and made them COVID-19 workers, in effect, and in doing so have saved lives.” 

###