[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[March 9, 1994]
[Pages 414-416]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Proposed Reemployment System Legislation
March 9, 1994

    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 2 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

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20 percent; and among minority youths in many inner cities it's over 50 
percent. So the number doesn't mean anything if there are huge pockets 
where no investment is made in people. And the Vice President and Henry 
Cisneros and the 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 2 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 accelerating 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 will 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, with the benefits and the coverages 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 that 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

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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 CEO's 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 redtape 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 
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 5 
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 last quarter--just today, the 
report that we had the highest increase in productivity in the last 3 
months of last year that we had in 8 years. But we know that that still 
is not benefiting 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.

Note: The President spoke at 2:26 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Lane Kirkland, president, AFL-CIO; 
Larry Perlman, chief executive officer, Ceridan Corp.; and John Hahn, 
Deb Woodbury, and Donald Hutchinson, participants in the Department of 
Labor conference on reemployment held on February 2.