Dear Penners: From time to time I have forwarded stuff to this list. I
believe this is the first time I ever thought it worth while to forward you
something from the Clinton Administration. I would be curious if this
"reemployment act" is really just another version of the Robert Reich "wish"
that just merely creating more educated workers will "create" the good jobs
with high pay that such workers on the average get --- or if there is
something positive in this that progressives can support. My own
predilections within the capitalist framework is to insist on a full
employment program supported (as I've said many times) by a simultaneious
commitment to monetary expansion in the "Bit Three" (Japan, Germany, US) in
order to create a little "reflation". However, I am interested in knowing if
this proposal actually is more BAD than GOOD and should be actively opposed.
The entire text follows: Mike Meeropol
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_______________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release March 9, 1994
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT PRESENTATION OF THE REEMPLOYMENT ACT
The East Room
2:26 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, John, for that
introduction. Mr. Vice President, Secretary Reich, thank you for your
wonderful work on this project. Lane Kirkland and Larry Perlman, thank
you for being up here with us and for representing the American
business and labor communities in the partnership we hope to build.
And I want to thank John Hahn from Niagara County, New
York -- I met him last month -- as he said he was laid off after 28
years at Bell Aerospace. And he learned new skills after 28 years as a
biomedical technician. He and Deb Woodbury and Donald Hutchinson were
all on our panel. It was a good one and I learned a lot listening to
them.
This morning when we were going over the day, early morning
in the White House, Mack McLarty mentioned to me, he said, we're going
to talk about two things today that you ran for President to do
something about because it helps all the people we grew up with. When I
started out on the long quest which led all of us to this particular
moment, and I talked to a lot of my fellow governors and friends who are
mayors, and others, it seemed to me that this country was really at some
risk of being thrown into the 21st century not being able to preserve
the American Dream and keep going, and that there were at least three
huge problems for ordinary Americans.
One was that more and more Americans were working harder
and harder for stagnant wages and falling closer and closer to the
poverty line. That's why we announced today the initiative on the
earned income tax credit and how it was going to impact working
families with children to lift them out of poverty.
Another was that no matter how low unemployment gets in
some areas, so many Americans are left behind -- by education and
location, normally. But it means that when we have a 6.5 percent
unemployment rate, as we do today, it's in fact quite a misnomer; that
the unemployment rate today among people with a college degree is 3.5
percent; and among people with some education after high school, at
least two years of further training, is a little over 5 percent; and
among high school graduates a little over 7 percent; and among high
school dropouts about 12 percent; and in many inner cities it's 20
percent; and among minority youths in many inner cities it's over 50
percent. So the number doesn't mean anything. There are huge pockets
where no investment is made in people.
And the Vice President and Henry Cisneros and Secretary of
Education who is here, the Secretary of Labor and others are working on
this whole community empowerment initiative to try to focus on that.
The third big problem is the one we come here to address
today -- the problem represented by these three fine people. And that
is that the average American will change jobs seven or eight times in a
lifetime whether he/she likes it or not. And what we have to do is to
make sure that they can like it; that these changes will add to
people's security, not to their insecurity. And we know that unless we
do that, that all of our bigger policies will not have a big impact on
the ordinary lives of the people that sent us all here in the first
place.
I'm proud of the fact that the efforts that we've made to
bring the deficit down and get interest rates down have led to big
increases in investment and over two million new jobs in the last year.
But there are lots of people who can't access those jobs. And as the
Secretary of Labor said, there's still a huge amount of turnover in
this economy. That's why this Reemployment Act of 1994 is so
important.
I think every one of you who has ever dealt with it knows
that the existing system for unemployment and training is simply broken
in the sense that it was designed for an economy that no longer exists.
It was designed basically just to hold people tight with a wage that was
below their earning but enough to live on until their old jobs came
back, because most jobs were lost in ordinary cyclical recessions. But
now we know that the great majority of workers who are laid off aren't
going to get their old jobs back -- that they're either caused by
structural changes in the economy or changes in the nature of those
particular job requirements themselves.
Last year, three out of four laid-off workers expected to
lose their jobs permanently -- the highest figure since the Labor
Department began keeping these statistics. The existing training
system, as the members of Congress know, is a crazy quilt of separate
programs that too often puts bureaucracy first and leaves the
customers, the unemployed workers, bewildered.
This act is designed to fix the system that's broken,
outmoded, bureaucratic, and too often delays people getting back to
work instead of accelerates their return to the work force. It will
build a new system to help workers get the training and counseling they
need to fill higher wage jobs more quickly.
The plan has four points -- first, to replace all these
fragmented programs with one-stop shopping; second, to offer more
choices for reemployment services that will put people back to work.
We do have, to be fair to America and to give our country and our
private sector a pat on the back, the most mobile and flexible labor
markets of any of the advanced countries. But oftentimes, these
retraining and unemployment programs actually put barriers in that
mobility instead of speeding it up. Third, we want to put the private
sector, business, and labor in charge of making sure that this training
actually prepares people for real jobs -- that if we are going to spend
money on training programs, that the money well be well spent and
relevantly spent. And fourth, we want real accountability in the
system so that we invest in job training programs that actually lead to
jobs.
Right now there are six separate programs for dislocated
workers. And workers get bounced around from office to office, program
to program. We have examples of workers in the same work force facing
the same dislocation, one eligible for one program, another eligible for
another, where the benefits and the coverage is different. So the first
element of the plan is to create one-stop shopping so workers can go to
one office and get the counseling and assistance they need and learn
about new job opportunities, the skills those jobs require, and the best
training programs to teach those particular skills at one place. No
American unemployed person should have to navigate the maze of laws that
the Congress passes for different reasons. The average American doesn't
care what law he or she fits under, they just want to know, here I am, I
need a job, I need training, how am I going to get it.
The second part of the plan is to make sure that along
with this one-stop shopping, workers will have the widest possible
range of choices for training and employment, letting the marketplace
bring to bear the kinds of things we know are there today. We want to
first reach out to workers as soon as possible after they lose their
jobs, or whenever possible, as we found in Sunnyvale, California, which
the Vice President mentioned, get advanced notice of that. And then we
want to offer them an array of choices that will help them to find the
opportunities and the training they need from a computer-based network
with information on job openings throughout the country, to counseling
on job searches, on-the-job training, long-term training for new skills
and training for people who want to start their own businesses.
For workers who start those new businesses, our plan will
allow them to make a start while still drawing unemployment insurance.
And for every worker, we offer the opportunity to make his or her own
choices about employment and training -- not to have someone else make
those choices for them.
We want to also train people for real jobs. That's why
the third part of the plan is to make sure that the efforts are guided
by people who have real experience in those jobs -- American business
and labor folks. Local work force investment boards, appointed by
local elected officials, will oversee these one-stop centers. Business
representatives from CEOs to plant managers will form the majority.
There will be representatives from labor and from the schools. And
because business and labor are already doing so much to train workers,
we want to encourage companies and unions to establish their own
one-stop centers for their own workers hit by layoffs and plant
closings.
Finally, this approach will demand accountability. We
cannot afford to waste the taxpayers' time or money or, more
importantly, the workers' time and the benefits that run by all too
quickly, on fly-by-night proprietary schools or government programs
long on red tape and short on results. We have to empower laid off
workers to choose their training from among private and public
providers who will compete for their business; require that the
providers offer them consumer reports so that they'll be able to make
informed choices: how many people got what kind of jobs at what kind
of pay? That, after all, is the ultimate test.
And the Secretary of Labor, under this approach, must
define measurable performance standards for training programs; and
those that fall short of the standards should lose their right to the
money. In five days, the leaders of the world's industrial nations
will meet in Detroit to discuss how to create high-wage jobs for all
our people. Our country's great strength is our resilience and
adaptability. That's what helps our businesses and our workers to be
as dynamic as this economy.
We know that other countries marvel still at the amount of
flexibility in our work force and in our economy. And the amount of
increased productivity we saw in the law quarter -- just today, the
report that we had the highest increase in productivity in the last
three months of last year that we had in eight years. But we know that
that still is not benefitting too many Americans who are lost in the
gaps of change.
The Reemployment Act of 1994 builds on our greatest
strengths, invests in our most important resource -- our people -- so
that we can turn the 20th century safety net into a 21st century
springboard to succeed and win in the global economy.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
QUIT
