[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[May 4, 1994]
[Pages 840-842]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Signing the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994
May 4, 1994

    Hey, Chris, just go on and sit in my seat. If you keep talking like 
that you'll occupy it someday anyway. [Laughter]
    My goodness, he was good. You know, all of us, I think, carry around 
inside progressive impulses and conservative impulses that send us 
different messages from time to time. And one of the conservative 
impulses that has been honed in me over time is always be careful what 
you do because of the law of unintended consequences. Well, when I think 
of the enormous bipartisan support this legislation has had, it didn't 
seem to me that there could possibly be any adverse unintended 
consequences. But do you realize what Chris Brady has done today by 
telling us what he does? Do you have any idea how many criminals all 
over the world have always wondered who monitored those $10,000 
transfers for the IRS? What the heck, it was worth it to get the bill 
and to meet him. [Laughter]
    You know, when a President signs a bill into law, normally he just 
needs the bill, a pen, and a desk. And ordinarily, the bill and the pen 
get the top billing; he signs the bill, hands out the pens. Today we're 
going to try to give the desk a little higher billing. It's no ordinary 
desk, and its presence here today, as much as any speech or ceremony, 
symbolizes what this bill is all about.
    Last month Janet Swenson gave her students at the Manufacturing 
Technology Project in Flint, Michigan, an assignment: Suppose the 
President wanted you to design a desk and build it to use at a White 
House ceremony. It couldn't look like a typical desk. It had to be 
inexpensive. It had to be easy to move and reassemble. Within an hour, 
eight of her students had formed a project team, drawn up rough 
blueprints, and even called a supplier to check on the availability of 
materials.
    Then they went to work. They drew on their knowledge of geometry and 
applied math to tinker with the blueprints. They negotiated with the 
vendors and bought the proper supplies. They built the desk at their 
center in Flint, Michigan. Then they broke it down, packed it up, and 
brought it with them to Washington. Yesterday, with a few Allen 
wrenches, they put it back together again here on the White House lawn, 
and here it is. This is a custom-made piece of furniture, developed, 
designed, built, delivered, and assembled by eight young people, none of 
whom is older than 20 years of age. I'd like to ask them to stand, along 
with their teacher. Where are they? Stand up. Here they are, these 
eight. Give them a hand. [Applause]
    This bill is not the end of a journey. It's not a problem that has 
been solved. Instead, it's a whole new approach to work and learning. 
Hillary and I were talking up here, as we looked out across this vast 
sea of faces of those of you whom we have known and worked with for so 
many years on this issue. I was thinking about how many nights I have 
talked to Bob Reich about this subject over the last 10 years, long 
before he ever dreamed he'd be Secretary of Labor and certainly before 
even his fertile imagination could have figured out how I might be able 
to appoint him someday. [Laughter]

[[Page 841]]

    The whole time I served as Governor of my State, I kept in my office 
a little silver box that Dick Riley gave me way back in 1979, the first 
time I went to South Carolina to meet with him and talk with him. I see 
in this audience the sea of faces of people with whom there is some 
story, some connection about this great endeavor on which we are 
embarked. The last major initiative I supported as the Governor of my 
State before I began campaigning for President was one designed to 
create a school-to-work network and a higher quality of training for 
young people who didn't go on to 4-year institutions of higher education 
and ultimately to degrees.
    This is the work, my fellow Americans, that we will have to continue 
for a lifetime. If you want to keep the American dream alive, we must 
not only create more jobs, we have to make it possible for people who 
work hard and do the right thing to become members of our middle class 
society.
    You heard Hillary mention the Grant commission report way back in 
'87 about the forgotten half, the young people who don't go on to 
further education and training, or the Carnegie report, ``America's 
Choice: High Skills and Low Wages.'' These are things that she and I and 
all of our people for years talked about because we knew the people 
personally who were affected by it. If you were fortunate enough to 
represent people from a small State, like me or Senator Mitchell, who 
never comes to the White House without at least one person from Maine--
I've now met half the population, Governor--[laughter]--thanks to his 
coming here--you actually know people who work harder every year for 
lower wages. You know people who lose their jobs and then they can never 
get a job that good again. You see what's happened in stark terms to 
people whom Senator Riegle represents in the automobile industry. There 
are millions of people like that everywhere.
    And so I want to begin just by thanking the Members of Congress who 
put aside partisanship and regionalism and everything else to pass this 
bill. And they have already been acknowledged, the leaders have, by 
Secretary Reich, but let me just acknowledge the people who played a 
major role in the various committees, whose names I now have: In 
addition to Chairman Ford, the minority leader of that committee, 
Congressman Bill Goodling; Congressman Dale Kildee; Congressman Steve 
Gunderson; on the Senate side, in addition to Chairman Kennedy and 
Senator Mitchell, Senator Durenberger, Senator Jeffords, Senator 
Metzenbaum, Senator Pell, Senator Simon, Senator Wofford, Senator 
Hatfield. And I know Senator Ford and Senator Riegle are here, but there 
are a slew of Members of Congress here whose names I don't have. But I 
want you to see the depth of support this bill has, so I'd like to ask 
every Member of Congress here present to stand so the rest of you can 
see how much they cared about this.
    We have probably more than 10 percent of the entire Congress here 
today. I thank Secretary Riley, and I'm glad that Secretary Reich could 
tear himself away from Jay Leno long enough to show up today. He was 
funny last night; did you see him? Probably wants a raise today. 
[Laughter] He needs further training before we do that. [Laughter]
    I want to thank the people from business and labor and education and 
the community activists, all of you who are here. And most important, I 
want to honor the young men and women who are now seizing the 
opportunity provided by existing programs to make sure they don't become 
part of America's forgotten half. Each of the young people who are here 
today will receive a certificate, but I think we ought to give them 
another hand and say we're pulling for their future. [Applause]
    Creating this national network of school-to-work programs is our 
common attempt to address perhaps the greatest challenge of our times 
for Americans: how to make the dramatic economic changes occurring all 
over the world work for our own people, how to put their interests first 
and reward their efforts and give life to their aspirations. We can 
revive our economy. We can bring the deficit down, increase investment, 
create jobs; we can expand trade. We can do all these things, but if we 
don't give our own people the change to reap the rewards of economic 
progress, we will have failed.
    The last two decades have been especially hard on the working people 
of America--all of you know that--especially on the 75 percent of our 
people who don't actually finish getting a 4-year college degree. We are 
now in a global economy where, to use my buzz phrase, what you earn 
depends on what you can learn, not even what you know. We now see that 
we passed the decade in the eighties where the gap between the wages of 
college graduates and

[[Page 842]]

high school graduates literally doubled because of global economic 
forces.
    For too long, we were the only country that did not have a system to 
provide this sort of education and training and opportunity for young 
people who don't go on to 4-year colleges. Oh, a lot of people were 
doing a great job of it and, interestingly enough, as so often happens 
to people, were way ahead of the system. And you can see that in the 
explosion of enrollments in high-quality 2-year programs all around the 
country and more and more high schools trying to come to grips with 
their responsibilities to train young people who weren't going to 
college. But we didn't have a way of providing these opportunities to 
all of our people.
    The legislation that I will sign is both innovative in structure and 
ambitious in scope. It doesn't simply throw a lot of new money or create 
a lot of new bureaucracy. Instead, it enables us in the National 
Government to be a catalyst, to bring together workers and businesses, 
parents and students, the experts and the doers, the designers and the 
implementers to create programs that work for every American in every 
community in this country. It will provide development grants for each 
State to plan comprehensive training and education and apprenticeship 
systems. And it will do what I think we ought to do: It will set 
national standards for what these programs must accomplish, grassroots 
reforms, national standards.
    The Federal Government is not very good at regulating or operating 
things like this, but we can know through readily available information 
what standards all programs ought to meet, and then we can empower 
people at the grassroots level to decide how they can most easily meet 
those standards. That's the sort of reinventing Government the Vice 
President is always talking about and working on. It's a small seed that 
will give us quickly, I predict to you, a national network of school-to-
work programs.
    In the years to come, our young people will be able to know with 
confidence that their learning will not end when they leave high school, 
but they won't leave high school without enough learning to go on to 
further training and to be productive citizens.
    This new law, as important as it is, is a part of a larger piece. 
Just a few weeks ago, I signed the Goals 2000 legislation, and a lot of 
you worked hard on that, setting national performance standards for the 
first time for our schools and again supporting grassroots reforms to 
achieve those standards. Now we're working cooperatively again in a 
bipartisan spirit with Congress to refine and to enact the last 
significant piece of this lifetime learning agenda, the reemployment 
act, that will change the unemployment system to a reemployment system 
in recognition of the fact that most people don't get called back to 
their old jobs when they are on unemployment.
    The average worker will now change jobs seven times in a lifetime, 
and in a workplace where ROM's and RAM's and robotics are the rage, 
there will never, ever be a time again when our workers won't need to 
learn something new. The reemployment act will, therefore, complement 
this school-to-work act and the Goals 2000 bill. And as the American 
people, with all their energy and ingenuity and ability, implement them, 
it will be a lasting tribute to those of you from all corners of America 
and all walks of life and both political parties who have known for many 
years that this was the thing we had to do.
    It will also be another chance to keep alive the dream that has 
driven so many of us to this place and this lawn today, the chance to 
make a good living, the chance to reach for the brass ring, the chance 
to achieve the American dream. That is, after all, what we were given 
and what we clearly owe to the young people here today and to their 
children.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:40 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Chris Brady, a school-to-work 
student from Boston, MA. H.R. 2884, approved May 4, was assigned Public 
Law No. 103-239.