[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[April 14, 1993]
[Pages 430-434]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Summer Jobs Conference in Arlington, Virginia
April 14, 1993

    Thank you very much. The speech that Octavius gave says more than 
anything I will be able to say today about why it's important to give 
all of our young people a chance to get a work experience and to 
continue to learn, to merge the nature of learning and work; why it's 
important to honor the efforts of people like Jerry Levin and Nancye 
Combs and Pat Irving and all of those who are here.
    I want to thank the Secretaries of Labor and Education and all the 
people who work with them for sponsoring this; my good friend, Governor 
Wilder, for being here and for speaking; and all of the business and 
local community leaders from the city and county and State level from 
around America who are here.
    This has been a pretty fun day. I loved hearing the young people 
sing. It was music to my ears because it is their future that we are 
really struggling about. A year and a half ago I began the quest to seek 
the Presidency because I was concerned about their future, because I 
believe that our country, which had always been a beacon of hope for the 
young, had too little opportunity, was too divided among ourselves 
across lines of income and race and region and other ways, without a 
vision to take us into the future.
    I entered with the hope that together we could create more 
opportunity and insist on much more responsibility from all of our 
people. But in the process we might recreate the best of America's 
community, knowing that together we could always do more than we could 
individually and that we might secure our future.
    All of you here today are committed to that. The 1,000 jobs that 
Jerry Levin has committed Time-Warner to is symbolic of the commitments 
made by many of the private sector people who are here, and those who 
are around the country. The work that Nancye Combs does, and the 
successes of all the young people like those on this stage, and 
especially the eloquent statement by Octavius Jeffers, all those things 
show that together we know what we need to do, and we're on the right 
track.
    Last July when I was traveling across Ameri-


[[Page 431]]

ca's heartland in my luxurious bus, I visited Seneca High School in 
Louisville, Kentucky. And there I met young people and business people 
who were participating in the Louisville Education and Employment 
Partnership. I saw what Nancye Combs talked about today. I saw how the 
young people were making an extra effort to succeed both in school and 
at work. I saw, as I have seen many times in my own State, the principle 
illustrated that Octavius talked about: that for millions of American 
young people it is really an impediment to both their learning and their 
ability to be good workers, to draw a sharp dividing line between what 
is work and what is learning.
    In the world in which we are living, the average young person will 
change the nature of work seven or eight times in a lifetime. We must 
learn to merge the work world and the learning world much better. And we 
must determine that all of our young people see the opportunities that 
some of them have had showcased here today.
    Whether you're in business or in government or in education, you 
know that we have a big job to do when it comes to building a future 
that really, honestly includes opportunity for all of our people. There 
are still a lot of people who say, ``Well, things are pretty good here 
in Washington. Everything's fine. The best thing we can do about this 
whole thing is nothing.'' They all have jobs, all the people who say 
that. They all have health insurance. They all have a pretty good 
education. And they all have a pretty secure knowledge that they'll be 
okay no matter what happens. I say that not to be either political or 
unduly critical but to point out that one of the great challenges of 
this age for every advanced nation, everyone, is to fully develop the 
capacities of all of its people and then find work for them to do.
    All the European countries have higher unemployment rates than we do 
but also stronger support systems for the unemployed. The Japanese 
unemployment rate has been going up. They're going to adopt a stimulus 
that, even if you count it in its most rigorous terms, is 3 or 4 times 
bigger than the one that I have proposed to create jobs. In West Germany 
alone, the unemployment rate is now about as high as ours.
    This is a big problem for advanced nations. It costs a lot of money 
to add an extra employee, with a lot of pressure from low-wage producers 
in other countries that are growing their own economies and trying to 
provide new opportunity for their people. But it is especially important 
for America for two reasons. One is, we have a whole lot of folks who, 
unless we move aggressively, will not have the education and skills we 
need to be competitive and productive in a nation like this. The second 
is, even if we educate them all, if there aren't jobs, they will be 
robbed of the fruits of their educational labors. People need to be able 
to work in this country.
    We have always had some unemployment, and indeed, some of it is 
normal. You've always got some people leaving jobs and moving around the 
country and doing first one thing and another. We have now, at this 
moment in our history, the necessity for all big organizations, 
including the Government, to reexamine the way they are organized and to 
ask whether there are too many people working at some kinds of jobs. But 
in the whole, we must still be able to create jobs in a country like 
America, to provide people with the chance to work.
    It's going to be difficult for me to make the welfare reform 
proposals that I will make to Congress in the next couple of months. 
It's going to be hard for me to make those work if at the end of all 
this work to get off welfare, there isn't a job.
    So we have two tasks. One is to develop the capacity of the American 
people to perform without regard to race or income or the circumstances 
of their birth. The other is to make sure that there are some 
opportunities for them to bring to bear for their talent and to be 
rewarded with a paycheck. It is a great challenge. I do not pretend that 
all of the answers are simple. But I know if you want to ask the 
American people, all of them, to be more responsible, if you want to 
recreate a sense of community in this country that bridges the lines of 
race and income and region, you have got to have opportunity in that 
mix.
    A part of our vision for America has to be a future for every young 
person in this country who's willing to play by the rules and work hard 
and strive for the end of the rainbow. There has to be something at the 
end of that rainbow. And that is what we are basically here to talk 
about today: What can we all do as partners, recognizing none of us can 
do it alone, to develop the capacities of our people to succeed wherever 
they live and whatever their

[[Page 432]]

background. And then, what can we do to make sure that there's something 
there for them to do?
    The summer jobs program we're discussing today is an integral part 
of that plan, because it will promote the values of work and opportunity 
and fairness, community. It will put the people first, and it does have 
a partnership between the public and private sector.
    I said when I addressed the United States Congress in February on 
this program that I would seek to create about 700,000 extra summer jobs 
from Government sources and then challenge the American business 
community to meet that target so that we can create more than a million 
new summer jobs over and above what had been created before.
    Many, many people have responded to that challenge. And Jerry is 
just a shining example of that which has been replicated in this room 
and around the country, people who are going to do more than they 
otherwise would in the private sector to give young people a work 
experience. And it is terribly important.
    I want to emphasize that this summer jobs program is part of an 
overall commitment to increase the capacity of the American people, from 
retraining defense workers who lose their jobs and other adults who need 
to acquire new skills, to improving the transition from school to work 
for young people who don't go to college but do need at least 2 years of 
post-high school training either on the job or in a community college or 
a vocational setting, so that they can be competitive workers, making it 
possible for more people to go on to college who do want to go. All 
these things are part and parcel of a comprehensive plan.
    It's also important, as I said, that we create more jobs. The 
emergency jobs program that I asked the Congress to adopt would create a 
half a million extra jobs over the next year and a half, and that would 
reduce the unemployment rate by a half a percent. It would also enable 
us to absorb more young people coming into the work force in jobs that 
otherwise will not be created. It also will help a lot of cities and 
counties to invest in things that need to be done at the grassroots 
level: projects long delayed, water projects, sewer projects, park 
projects, new industries and particularly in small- and medium-size 
communities, a whole range of things that will improve the economy and 
improve the environment.
    The summer jobs program is an important part of that because we have 
tried for the first time, through the work of the Labor Department and 
the Education Department and through reaching out to people like you, to 
make this more than just a one-shot summer jobs program; to integrate it 
with private sector efforts; to hopefully replicate it in each coming 
summer; to move these young people into further educational 
opportunities and to further job opportunities; and to have a strong, 
meaningful education component to these summer jobs, something that the 
United States Government has never fully emphasized before.
    A lot of these young people, as you well know, because they come 
from difficult backgrounds, because they go to school in difficult and 
challenging circumstances, need extra help in building their basic 
skills in math and language, reasoning, and in other areas. And a lot of 
educational studies show that young people who have difficulty in school 
often forget as much as 30 percent of what they learn over the summer 
and then that has to be repeated the next year.
    What we are trying to do here is to give people the opportunity to 
learn good work habits and to reinforce their learning skills and to put 
them together, and then, hopefully, over the next couple of years, if 
our entire program passes, to give every school in this country the 
opportunity to have a good work and learning environment.
    There will be more applied academics, more opportunities for people 
to learn and work during the school year, so that this will not simply 
be an isolated moment for these young folks but will be a part of 
building a whole new educational experience, a whole new work 
experience, and moving on a pathway to a better future.
    The summer jobs programs are not designed to be make-work jobs. 
They're designed to make a future for the people holding the job. And 
that's what they will do. In the process, they'll help to build local 
communities, to strengthen local economies, to solve local problems--
real jobs renovating housing, repairing public buildings, doing clerical 
work, providing nursing assistance in hospitals, supervising and 
training children at child care centers, and learning all the way, 
challenging young people to learn while they earn but letting them earn.
    You know, it's very difficult to make a case

[[Page 433]]

to people who have never seen opportunity on their own street that they 
should do this, that, or the other thing if there's no evidence of the 
opportunity that's at the end of the effort. I have not been sparing in 
going for the last year-and-a-half into places where it isn't exactly 
popular to say it and say I wanted to reform the welfare system; I 
wanted to toughen child support; I wanted to require people to work; I 
was sick and tired of people being irresponsible in the use of guns on 
the streets, and I wanted to change all that. But if you're going to 
summon people to greater responsibility, you have to reward them when 
they do the right thing with opportunity.
    The young people we propose to put to work under our program will 
spend 90 hours learning basic skills, such as math, reading, writing, 
either on the job or in the classroom. They will stretch their minds as 
well as work up a sweat. They will have a sense of accomplishment. It 
will literally be a summer challenge but a challenge that will take them 
into a different life.
    So I want to ask all of you to support this effort even as I, as 
your President, support your effort. At the end of the summer we will 
evaluate all the young people who participate. We'll see whether they, 
instead of falling behind over the summer academically as too many young 
people do, they stayed even or moved ahead. I suspect that they will.
    This summer, Secretary Reich and Secretary Riley and I will be 
visiting many of your communities. We'll really try to learn from you 
which of these efforts are working, what we should do next summer, how 
we can build it in to what goes on during the school year, how we can 
build in our job training efforts and the works that we do with your 
companies to make sense of this whole thing, so that we maximize the 
impact of the taxpayer dollar and your private investments as well.
    We want to honor the companies and the communities, the business 
leaders and the young people who do the very best jobs this summer. And 
again, I want to say to all of you in private business who have matched 
our effort, I thank you. And to all of you who haven't and those across 
the country who may listen or learn about this event today, I want to 
implore other private employers to stretch a little bit to give other 
young people a chance to work this summer. I'm telling you, we cannot go 
through another 10 years when we don't give these children anything to 
say yes to. If we exhort them to do right, we've got to be able to 
reward them.
    When the other speakers were talking, I was sitting up here on the 
platform, listening and reveling. And they got talking about work, and I 
got to thinking about all the different things I've done to make a 
living in my life. When I was 13, I made a very foolish short-term 
business investment: I set up a comic book stand and sold two trunks 
full of comic books. Made more money than I had ever had in my life. But 
if I had saved those trunks, they'd be worth $100,000 today. [Laughter] 
That does not mean young people should not be entrepreneurial. It just 
means that you can't foresee a generation ahead. I have mowed yards and 
cleared land and built houses and worked in body shops and the parts 
departments of a car dealership. And I've done a lot of different things 
for a living. Some people say I got into politics to escape work. 
[Laughter]
    I learned something from every job I ever had. But I grew up in a 
generation where I literally did not know a living soul, without regard 
to race or income, who wanted to work who didn't have a job. I grew up 
in a generation when all you had to really say to people is, get an 
education, and you'll be all right. You'll get a job, and you'll make 
more money next year than you did this year. Now I live in a generation 
full of people, most of whom don't make any more money in real dollars 
than they did 10 years ago, and they're working longer hours, and 
they're paying more for the basics of life. And we are now wondering 
whether we can create the jobs that these young people want.
    Now, I want to close by reemphasizing these two things: It doesn't 
matter what kind of economic policies this administration pursues or how 
much productivity increases there are in the private sector. If young 
Americans don't get a good education, don't learn how to work, and can't 
be productive, those jobs will not be created in this country. Machines 
will do the work, or the work will be done off-shore by people who have 
the same skill levels and can work for a third or a fourth or a fifth 
the wages. So nothing we can do economically will matter unless we build 
the skills and capacities of America's work force. And anybody that 
pretends otherwise is just kidding.
    On the other hand, we need to be honest. Every wealthy country in 
the world, including

[[Page 434]]

the United States, is having difficulty creating jobs. If I knew 
everything that needs to be done, I'd be glad to tell you, and we could 
just call off the whole deliberations of Congress and everything else. I 
don't have all the answers. But I know this: Doing nothing is not the 
answer.
    And so the jobs program that I have presented to Congress, with the 
summer jobs, with the money for the cities and the counties, through the 
community development program, with the infrastructure money, is a small 
part of a big budget. It is an attempt to engage in an experiment to see 
whether or not, with the economy recovering in terms of corporate 
profit, we can give a little boost to it, give opportunities to young 
people, create a half a million jobs, and maybe get the engine going 
again.
    Most of the jobs in this program are going to be jobs in the private 
sector, not Government jobs, even though it's Government money. And the 
lion's share of the work in rebuilding the American economy obviously 
will come from the private sector. That's the kind of system we have, 
and it works pretty well.
    But this is the challenge we have. So I ask all of you here today to 
support the summer jobs program, to ask your friends and neighbors to 
support it, to go back home and ask your employers to make a little 
extra effort, to do what you can to help me pass the funds to create the 
700,000 jobs that the United States Government should create this 
summer, so that together we can have this partnership. Because more than 
anything else, we have to give a future, a future that our young people 
can believe in.
    We need to send them a message that here in America if you study 
hard and work hard, if you obey the law and contribute something to your 
community, you will be rewarded by your country. You can build a future 
from your own dreams.
    That has always been the promise of America. Together that's what 
this summer of challenge needs to be: a reaffirmation of the promise of 
America for so many young people to whom that promise has been an 
illusion. We can make it a reality.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:22 a.m. in the Regency Ballroom at the 
Hyatt Regency Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Octavius Jeffers, 
1992 Summer Youth Program participant; Jerry Levin, chairman of the 
board, Time-Warner, Inc.; Nancye Combs, chair, Private Industry Council; 
and Patricia Irving, president and chief executive officer, Private 
Industry Council of Philadelphia.