    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [April 5, 1995]
    [Pages 456-462]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Conference of the Building and Construction
    Trades Department of the AFL-CIO
    April 5, 1995

        Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that
    wonderful welcome. Thank you, Bob Georgine, for that fine introduction,
    all the distinguished affiliated presidents up here on the platform, and
    all of you out there in the audience. And I thank those of you who
    brought your children. Since most of what we're doing and a lot of what
    I have to say is about them, I'm glad to see them here.
        I forgive the person in the back who shouted, ``UCLA.'' I told the
    Gridiron Dinner the other night at the Press Club--I said my worst
    nightmare was a final with Arkansas and UCLA, my worst nightmare, the
    team I love against a team with 54 electoral votes. [Laughter] It was a
    great tournament, a great game. They won it fair and square, and I
    congratulate them.
        You know, a lot of us here have a lot in common. Bob and I have
    something in common. We were both raised by strong mothers who believed
    in hard work and optimism and practiced what they preached and made sure
    that we practiced what they preached. It was our first lesson in
    organized labor. [Laughter]
        I'm deeply honored to be here with you today. I want to thank you
    for the support that you have given to our programs to train America's
    workers for the future. I believe that good, strong unions and
    collective bargaining can help us to meet the challenges that are just
    ahead if all of us are willing to embrace those challenges and to do
    what has to be done to make sure that we compete and win in the global
    economy.
        That's why one of the very first things I did as President was to
    rescind the anti-union Executive orders of the last 12 years and why
    last month I also signed an Executive order which

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    bars Federal agencies from doing business with companies that hire
    permanent replacement workers.
        I have been saying as I'm going around the country that we know what
    works in our own lives. What works in our own lives is when we are well-
    educated, well-trained, we work hard, and we work together. There is no
    future in this country in pitting management against labor. All of us
    are caught up now in a common destiny in the global economy. All of us
    will have more job security or more job insecurity, as the case may be,
    depending on how well we adapt to the challenges of today and tomorrow.
        That is the way we have to look at this. We are going up or down
    together. And it is time we stop looking for ways to be divided, one
    from another, and start at looking harder for how we can resolve these
    divisions in an open and honest way so we can get about the business of
    building our future. That's what we ought to be doing in this country,
    and that's what I'm trying to do for you every day at the White House.
        I look at the unions represented here, the carpenters, the painters,
    the bricklayers, the electricians, the others; you built our homes, our
    cities, our factories, the biggest industrial system in the world. You
    have built our country. And then you have had to rebuild our country.
    One of the greatest wonders I have seen since I have been President is
    the swift handiwork of your members who rushed in after the natural
    disasters, from Florida to the Midwest to California. You did a very
    good job. And we now are doing a better job with our Emergency
    Management Agency to try to make sure we do our part and the money gets
    out there to rebuild places who are torn down through no fault of their
    own.
        Many of you have become heroes to folks whose lives were devastated
    in those disasters, who wouldn't have a bridge to cross a river or roads
    to get them to work or offices to work in or roofs over their head if
    you hadn't worked hard to make sure that the American dream could be
    restored.
        All through 1992 when I was out running for President, I met a lot
    of people who wondered about the state of the American dream, including
    construction workers, farmers, office workers, mothers and fathers. I
    talked with them and listened to them; I worked with them. I walked a
    picket line with them, with the Caterpillar workers in Illinois. What I
    found was that most people felt that they were out there on their own,
    struggling against forces that were bigger than they were without
    anybody very much concerned about what was going to happen to them.
        I ran for President because I felt strongly that the end of the cold
    war and the dawn of the information age gave us opportunities for peace
    and prosperity, gave our children opportunities to live out their dreams
    never before known in human history, but that we also had some very,
    very profound challenges that unless they were faced, the American dream
    for all of our people would be at risk.
        I wanted to make sure that middle class Americans and their children
    were not forgotten. I wanted to make sure that poor people would have a
    chance to work their way into the middle class. I wanted to make sure
    that we could keep alive opportunities for entrepreneurs to become
    wildly successful without forgetting that this country was built and
    this country will endure by the broad middle class and by the fact that
    they work hard, play by the rules, raise their children, and deserve to
    be rewarded for it, and must be rewarded for it if we're going to keep
    the American dream alive. That is why I ran for this job.
        I also, very frankly, ran to challenge middle class America, because
    there are many things that Government cannot and should not do. The most
    important things in the world to us, our commitments, our values, our
    work, our family, our communities, by and large operate independent of
    the Government.
        Today we're having a great debate here in Washington about what role
    our National Government should play and how far we can go in working
    together and moving together. Really, the debate has been going on for
    at least 15 years now, a debate that, frankly, I'm getting kind of tired
    of: an old debate that defends Government at every turn, a new debate
    that attacks Government at every turn; an old view that says we should
    spend more on everything, a new view that says we should spend less on
    everything; an old view that said we should do more of everything, a new
    view that says we should do less of everything. Both views defy our
    common experience, our common sense, and what we see about what's
    working, not only here in the United States but around the world.

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        What works is when the Government, in my judgment, focuses on four
    things. First of all, creating economic opportunity, jobs, working for
    better jobs and higher incomes, and demanding responsible behavior from
    citizens in return. I had an economic meeting in Atlanta last week, and
    Hugh McColl, from North Carolina, the chairman of NationsBank, pointed
    out that about that time, he said, ``Tonight your basketball team and
    mine are going to have a basketball game. And the referee is going to
    throw the ball up, make sure the playing field is level, enforce the
    rules, and otherwise get out of the way. And that's about what the
    Government ought to do.'' But we have to make sure the playing field is
    level, that there are rules that are enforced, and we get out of the
    way.
        The second thing that we have to pay attention to is the security of
    our people, our security from attack from abroad and our security from
    within. I'm proud of the fact that since I have been President, for the
    first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no Russian
    missiles pointed at the children of the United States of America. I am
    proud of that. But I know and you know that our security is also
    threatened by crime and violence and drugs on our streets. And our
    security is also threatened by the things which are breaking our
    families apart and punishing people who are doing their best to do the
    right things.
        That's why we worked so hard to pass that crime bill with 100,000
    police on the streets and with prevention programs to give our kids
    something to say yes to and why we should not walk away from our
    commitment to putting 100,000 police on the street. Violent crime has
    tripled in the United States in the last 30 years; the police forces
    have expanded by 10 percent. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to
    know that we could lower the crime rate if we did what city after city
    after city is doing now and put more police on the block, working with
    kids, trying to prevent crime and catch criminals quicker. And we must
    not back away from that commitment to our security.
        And there is another element to our security, too. It's what happens
    to families. Are we really going to reward work? Are we going to permit
    people to be successful workers and successful parents? Most places
    today, whether they're single-parent or two-parent households, all the
    parents are working. That's why I fought so hard for the Family and
    Medical Leave Act--I saw that as a question of family security; why I
    want to see all the children in this country immunized; why in the
    economic plan last year we insisted that we give tax breaks for families
    with incomes just above the poverty line so we would not encourage
    anybody to slip back into welfare, and because nobody who works full-
    time and has children in the home should live in poverty in this
    country. If you work hard, you ought to be able to have a decent life.
        The third thing we have to do is to reform the Government. We do
    have to change it. It ought to be smaller. It ought to be less
    bureaucratic. We ought to give more decisions back to the State and
    local government. We ought to give more decisions back to private
    citizens in their own lives. We ought to have Government that meets
    tomorrow's problems, not yesterday's.
        That's why we've worked hard at deregulation and why we have given
    more responsibility to States in the area of welfare and health care
    reform than--in 2 years--than the last two administrations combined did
    in 12 years. We have been the administration that has pushed the
    decentralization of authority for solving a lot of our problems. And
    we've reduced the size of Government. There are over 100,000 fewer
    people working for the Federal Government today than there were on the
    day I became President.
        And we have also decided that we have to solve some problems too
    long ignored. In a little-known action at the end of the last Congress,
    there was a reform in the United States pension systems which saved the
    pensions of 8\1/2\ million working Americans who were in danger of
    losing their pensions and protected the pensions of over 30 million
    more. We still have work to do, and when we have to do it, we should do
    it well.
        The fourth thing we have to do, and maybe the most important of all,
    is to help our people make the most of their own lives by making sure
    that everywhere--everywhere--we have a system of lifetime education and
    training that will permit people always to find work and always to
    compete and win in the global economy. That is what I think the job of
    Government is: create jobs, get better paying jobs, increase the
    security of the American people, make the Government smaller and less
    bureaucratic, but do the job that has to be done, and give people the
    skills they need to make the most of their own lives. That should be our
    road map.

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        If we could create opportunity and we can insist on more
    responsibility from the American people--and I believe that strongly.
    That's what welfare reform is all about. We'll help you if you're in
    trouble but not for a lifetime; you've got to go to work sometime. I
    think that's what child support enforcement is all about. If you've got
    the money, you ought to be taking care of your kid, not asking the
    taxpayers to do it. That's what enforcing the student loan program is
    all about. I increased the availability of student loans, but when I
    became President, it was costing you $2.8 billion a year because people
    weren't paying the loans back. We've cut that down to a billion dollars
    a year. If people borrowed money from the Government to go to college,
    they ought to pay it back when they get a job so other kids can borrow
    the money when they come along.
        I have called this new arrangement the New Covenant. What it means
    to me is simple: The Government should try to create more opportunity,
    but the citizens of this country are going to have to behave more
    responsibly in seizing it. And if you put the two together, there will
    be no stopping the United States.
        Now, if you look at what's been accomplished in the last couple of
    years, I think the most important thing is that we have changed the
    direction of economic policy in this country. We went beyond the old
    debate. There's no more tax and spend, but there's not more trickle-
    down, either. This is invest and grow economics. And look at the
    results.
        Two years ago when we were fighting for the economic plan, the
    people who were against it said the sky would fall: ``If the President's
    plan passes, the economy will be wrecked. Everything will be terrible.''
    Some said I was cutting too much. Some said it was an error to raise
    taxes on the wealthiest Americans to put against the deficit because
    that would hurt the economy. Well, 2 years later, we have over 6 million
    new jobs and the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in
    25 years.
        In reducing the deficit by $600 billion, we took $10,000 in debt off
    the future of every family in the United States. In cutting taxes for 15
    million working families, this year, on average, families with two kids
    with an income of $25,000 a year or less will pay about $1,000 less in
    taxes than they would have if that economic plan hadn't passed. We made
    it possible for our country to say, ``If you work 40 hours a week and
    you have a child in your home, you will not be in poverty.'' That is
    important, folks. If you want people to get off welfare, we have to
    reward work. And it's also why, by the way, we ought to raise the
    minimum wage, because people can't live on it.
        And we didn't just spend more money on everything. We cut 300
    programs, and the new budget I proposed cuts or consolidates 400 more.
        We've also done what we could to help those of you in labor who have
    been taking responsibility all along. Last year, the AFL-CIO listed all
    the bills supported by organized labor that I signed into law. As of
    last fall, there were 32 of them--motor voter, family and medical leave,
    the assault weapons ban, to name just a few--laws that increased our
    security as workers, parents, and citizens.
        But you know, in spite of all this, there's still a lot more to do.
    I have people all the time come up to me in kind of bewilderment and
    say, ``Well, things are going well in my business. Things are going well
    for our country. This country is in better shape than it was 2 years
    ago. Why are people still so negative about the future of the country?''
    When you ask people what about the direction of the country, they say
    they are worried. I was interviewed by a magazine the other day saying
    their annual readers poll said that people understood that things were
    getting better, but they were more worried about their personal security
    than ever before. Why is that?
        Well, there's a reason for that. The global economy has imposed new
    challenges and new burdens on our country and every wealthy country in
    the world and runs the risk in our country of literally splitting apart
    the American idea. Let me explain what I mean by that.
        From the time I was born at the end of World War II until the year I
    was elected Governor of my State for the first time, 1978, the American
    people moved forward in absolute lock-step. That is, if you break the
    economy into people who are in the lowest 20 percent and the second and
    so forth on to the top 20 percent, all of them had about the same
    increase in their incomes. Incomes roughly doubled in America from 1950
    to 1978 evenly across the board, except the poorest 20 percent had an
    increase of 140 percent. So we were all going forward, and we were
    actually coming together.

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        Since 1978, that's all changed. Wages have been stagnant and not
    kept up with inflation on average for hourly wage earners. And in the
    last 15 years, half of the American people are now living for the same
    or lower earnings that they were making 15 years ago when you adjust for
    inflation. Why? Because of the way the technology revolution and the
    global economy, where management and money and technology can fly across
    national borders, have divided opportunity, so that people with high
    levels of skill in growth industries tend to do well, and people with
    lower skill levels tend to get hurt. And then, if our Government walks
    away from its obligations to invest in our future, even more people get
    hurt.
        The other thing that's happened is because the economy is changing
    so fast, even a lot of people that are doing well today think they're
    waiting for the other shoe to drop. So many big companies getting
    smaller all the time--you ought to read my mail about it, people my age,
    even young people I grew up with--not so young anymore--writing me,
    saying, ``You know, I've worked for this company for 25 years. I've got
    to send my kids to college. We're doing great now, but what happens if
    they lay me off?''
        So there is this uncertainty in our country today, even though we
    are clearly in better shape than we were 2 years ago. We've turned away
    from the false choice between tax and spend and trickle-down economics.
    We're moving in the right direction. The question is, how can we get
    everybody involved in the American dream? How can we reward everyone's
    work? How can we make people more secure in living with all these
    changes that are rifling through the world? That is the burden that I
    carry to the office every day, because I know--I know that if everybody
    in this country had a chance to live their lives the way most of you
    have lived your lives and raised your kids, this country would be fine,
    and our future would be unlimited.
        The key to the 21st century, more than anything else, is clearly
    education for young people, lifetime job training for adults. It is
    clear that if we can raise the skill levels of our people, constantly
    and permanently, and continue to change the job mix so that we're always
    getting America's share of those high-wage jobs, we can keep the
    American dream alive, and we can stop the middle class from splitting
    apart, so that everybody can grow and prosper. That is our great
    challenge, and that is the one we must not walk away from.
        You have been working on this for years. You've had opportunities to
    train a new generation of builders. I want to especially commend the
    outreach programs that you've had with the Housing and Urban Development
    Department, reaching deep into our cities, taking thousands of young
    people from housing projects, teaching them the skills, and clearing
    away the obstacles to job opportunities. You have done some things that
    the Government could not do. And I thank you for that. I know that Bob
    really cares a lot about this outreach program because he spent his own
    early years in housing projects in Chicago. This is the kind of
    partnership we need more of.
        For Government's part, we have to do more, as well. In 1994, the
    educational experts said that the United States Congress, in passing our
    education program, did more for education than had been done in
    Washington in 30 years. We expanded Head Start. We established the Goals
    2000 program, which writes the national education goals into law but
    gives our local schools more flexibility in how they spend Federal money
    to achieve excellence. We dramatically increased the number of programs
    around our country for apprenticeships from young people leaving high
    school who aren't going on to college. And we expanded the availability
    of college loans to the middle class, at lower cost and better repayment
    terms.
        And of course, our national service program, AmeriCorps, is now
    bigger than the Peace Corps ever was. And there are 20,000 young people
    all across America working in community service projects, doing things
    that need to be done and earning funds to go on to college.
        Those are the kinds of things we must do more of. Those are the
    kinds of things that are important. That's why I said a moment ago that
    if we work on education and we work on incomes, the rest of this will
    pretty much take care of itself, I think. That's why I hope the Congress
    this year will not only raise the minimum wage, but with all this tax
    cut talk, we can't afford a lot of these tax cuts. We've got too big a
    deficit. But we ought to give the middle class a break. And the most
    important thing we could do is give people a tax deduction for any costs
    they or their children have for

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    any education after high school, because that will raise incomes over
    the long run.
        Let me just ask you one other thing I want you to think about. There
    are a lot of exciting things going on in this town these days. And as I
    said, we are debating the role of Government, but there must be a
    distinction made. If you don't believe in tax-and-spend economics and
    you don't believe in trickle-down economics and you do believe in
    invest-and-grow economics and you've seen how it is working the last 2
    years, then you also have to reject this debate that we should spend
    more money on everything or we should spend less money on everything.
        We have to make judgments up here based on what is important.
    Therefore, I would say, let's cut more spending. I have cut and cut and
    cut, and I want to cut some more. We've got to get this budget deficit
    down further. We can bring this budget into balance, and we can do it in
    a fair way. But we have to make judgments. We should not be cutting Head
    Start. We should not be cutting aid to the public schools. We shouldn't
    be cutting the apprenticeship programs. And we certainly shouldn't be
    limiting the availability of college loans to the middle class. We
    shouldn't be adding to the cost of college education for working
    families. These are proposals that I think are wrong. We shouldn't be
    eliminating national service. And we certainly shouldn't be doing all
    these things either to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans or
    because we refuse to find other things to cut. That is wrong. Let's make
    decisions, and let's do it right, and let's stick up for education and
    training.
        And you have issues in this Congress--Bob referred to one of them,
    the Davis-Bacon law. We need to make this economy more competitive. But
    we need more high wages. We don't need a low-wage strategy; we need a
    high-wage strategy for the future. We need a high-wage strategy. Like
    every other law, it shouldn't be abused. We should not pretend it's
    something it's not. But it is a decent thing to say that the Government
    should stand on the side of good wages and the real wages in the
    community that are good and fair.
        I've made appointments, like Bill Gould to the National Labor
    Relations Board and Fred Feinstein to be the General Counsel, who now
    have given you a board that believes in the process of collective
    bargaining and one that believes we can be fair to workers. These are
    the kinds of things that we ought to do if you believe our future is in
    working together.
        I'm not for repealing Davis-Bacon. I also believe that we should not
    walk away from our commitment to safety in the American workplace. In
    1993 there were more than half a million construction injuries and over
    900 fatalities. We can reform OSHA in ways that you feel better about it
    and employers feel better about it, where it works better and makes more
    sense and helps you get more jobs and gain more income and helps them
    make bigger profits. But we cannot walk away from the fundamental fact
    that before we were committed to worker safety, a lot more people died
    in the workplace, a lot more people were permanently maimed in the
    workplace, a lot of more people were hurt in the workplace. There is a
    right way and a wrong way to reduce the burden of Government.
        I could just--let me mention one other thing that affects some of
    your industries. I believe with all my heart if we hadn't passed the
    environmental protection legislation in the 1970's, the air would not be
    as clean, the water would not be as pure as it is today, and the legacy
    we're going to pass along to our children would not be as good. I
    believe that. I also believe, like any Government bureaucracy, there are
    things about the EPA that ought to be changed. So we're going to more
    market-based incentives to give companies incentives to clean up the
    environment. And Carol Browner, our Administrator, is reducing by 25
    percent the paperwork burden of the EPA. It will free up 20 million man-
    hours of work next year. That's a lot of time in a lot of industries
    that all of you work in.
        We're trying to give small businesses a break. We're saying to small
    businesses--I was at a union print shop in Virginia a couple of weeks
    ago to announce this--if you worry about whether you've got an EPA
    violation and you're afraid to call because you're afraid they'll fine
    you, now we're going to set up a compliance center, and if you call
    there and ask, if you ask, you can't be fined for 6 months. And you're
    going to be given a chance to clean up the problems.
        I think we can change the way Government regulation works to make it
    less nutty. But let's not forget that we have a common public interest
    in a safe workplace. We have a common public interest in a clean
    environment. And we

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    have a common public interest in having a high-wage, high-growth
    partnership economy, not a low-wage, stagnant, divided economy.
        So I say to you, engage the Members of Congress; tell them you
    welcome the debate about the role of Government. But Government has
    certain responsibilities: first of all, to change and get rid of the
    past stuff that doesn't work; to create more opportunity; to provide
    more security; to insist on more responsibility, but to give people the
    education and training and skills they need to make it in the 21st
    century.
        I'm telling you that if we take advantage of this time, if we keep
    the economic strategy that we have adopted--that I hammered through the
    Congress by the narrowest of margins, with all the doubters saying,
    ``Well, we had to either have tax and spend or trickle-down,'' and I
    knew this was the right thing to do--if we will stay with this economic
    strategy and then aggressively go after strategies to raise wages, raise
    incomes, educate and train people, and if we don't throw out the baby
    with the bath water, this country is going to do just fine.
        I am looking for a future for America like the ones most of us who
    are my age in this audience used to take for granted. And we can give it
    to our kids, but only if we are tough enough and wise enough and
    compassionate enough to do what we know in our heart is right. You help,
    we'll do it.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:20 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
    Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Bob Georgine,
    president, Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO.