    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [April 10, 1995]
    [Pages 511-514]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to Working Women
    April 10, 1995

        Thank you, Marina. Thank you for having the courage to come up here
    and give that speech. For those of us who do it every day it may seem
    normal, but I couldn't help realizing what a brave thing it was for her
    to come up here and just stand in front of all of you and speak so
    eloquently and powerfully. And I know a lot of you who are out here
    representing working women in so many different walks of life identified
    with everything she had to say, so maybe you ought to give her another
    hand. [Applause]
        Thank you, Karen Nussbaum, for the outstanding job you do. And thank
    you, Secretary Reich, for being the conscience of all working Americans
    in this administration. And thank you, Hillary, for being a good symbol
    of that.
        This is an issue that's very important to me personally. My
    grandmother was a working woman from the 1930's on. My mother was a
    working woman from the 1940's on. It never occurred to me from the first
    day I met Hillary that we would not have a two-worker home. And as she
    told those village women--even in Bangladesh, now they know that, until
    I became President, she always made more money than I did. [Laughter]
        The interesting thing to me about this issue is that it really
    reflects the larger dilemmas of our society today. We want to have
    opportunities open for women to work and to fulfill their own dreams,
    and surely that is one of the things that drives women into the work
    force. But it's also true that a lot of women work even under the most
    difficult circumstances simply because they have to. And in either case,
    what we should want for women is to be able to be successful in the
    workplace and successful in the home.
        This afternoon--as you heard, I got all these letters from all
    across the country; I want to read you just a couple. A working mother
    from Milwaukee said, ``Between balancing home and working a job, you
    always feel like you're doing four things at once. You're doing your
    job, but you're thinking about what you're going to cook for supper and
    who's going to pick up the kids.'' A 34-year-old woman put it this way:
    ``Being a working woman is like having two full-time jobs. We're
    expected to be perfect in both career and taking care of the home, but
    without adequate compensation for either.'' [Laughter]

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        As the son, as I said, the grandson, and the husband of working
    women, I hear these voices. I hear you. The 60 million American women
    who work do deserve a better deal. The recommendations that I have
    received we are committed to putting into action.
        If you think about the great challenges facing America today,
    resolving the dilemmas of working women are critical to our meeting
    them. Women want to be treated as assets to be developed in the
    workplace, not costs to be cut. They deserve to work in an environment
    that treats them with dignity, respects the value of their families, and
    invests in their skills and their future. This is not just the fair and
    decent thing to do, it is the smart thing to do for America.
        More and more as I serve in this office, it becomes clearer to me
    that the decent thing to do is the smart thing to do; that over and over
    and over again, all the new opportunities that this age offers us
    require us to fight against the temptation to take the shortcut, to take
    the easy way out, to hold the wages down, to deny the benefits, to deny
    the importance of raising children while being in the workplace. What is
    in our interest over the long run is to take advantage of all these
    rapid changes which are going on in our society and still allow people
    to have some stability, some order, some pace in their lives so that
    they can raise their children and honor their marriages and grow as
    people at work and after work. That, it seems to me, is a fundamental
    mission that this society--not this administration, this society--should
    be pursuing.
        My mother worked for over 30 years, and she was always proud of what
    she did. And because we had two workers in the family, we always did
    pretty well. There are a lot of women out their now raising their
    children alone, and a lot of others in two-worker families where one or
    the other seems to be always out of a job because of all the changes
    that are going on today.
        Then there are a lot of people who just have circumstances that are
    downright almost unimaginable. I never will forget the last race I made
    for Governor of my State. I always made a habit of going to a factory in
    the northern part of Arkansas, because they had the earliest factory
    gate in the State; everybody had to show up between 4 and a quarter to
    5, everybody. And I was there at 4:30 one morning, and a pickup truck
    pulled up. And in this pickup truck with one seat, there was a husband,
    a wife, and three little kids. And I saw the mother get out, and go to
    work at 4:30 in the morning. And I asked the father--I went over to the
    father, and I said, ``How do you deal with this?'' He said, ``Well, I
    don't have to be at work until 6:30. But,'' he said, ``my kids can't go
    to school until 7:30 or even to day care. So I had to find someone else
    to take my kids between 6 in the morning when I have to leave and the
    rest of the time. And we have to get them all up every day so we can
    drop their mother off, because we can't have anybody coming to our
    house.''
        This sounds like an extreme example, but a lot of you sitting in
    this audience have other examples that are just as difficult. This is
    the fact of life in America today.
        Recently in Atlanta, I was down there for an economic conference,
    and I met a woman who ran a day care center who told me about all of the
    problems that the children were having from time to time. And she told
    me that she had a young boy who one day at lunchtime missed his mother
    so much, and she could not get off of work and come see him at the day
    care center. And he was crying and crying. So she suggested that he
    should draw a picture of his mother, and that would make him miss his
    mother less. So the boy drew a picture of his mother, but then he taped
    it to the chair next to his, and he wouldn't let anybody else sit in the
    chair all day long. [Laughter] He sat with his mother all day long at
    the day care center.
        I know that if we lived in other countries we would have other
    problems. I know that America still has more opportunities for women
    than most societies. And I know that most of us are doing the best we
    can and most of you will do very well and your children will grow up
    fine. But I also know that we cannot become the society we want to be as
    we move into the next century unless we address the problems that came
    out of what these 250,000 women said to me when we asked all of you what
    the state of life was like in America today. Working women must count.
        You know, we've already made a down payment. The First Lady
    mentioned the family and medical leave law. When I went home to Arkansas
    about a week ago and I went to my church--and the first person I met at
    my church was a woman I didn't know. She came out, and

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    she said, ``If you hadn't signed that family leave law, my family would
    have been ruined, because I got sick. And my husband and I were able to
    deal with that, and he could take some time off to deal with me, and
    neither one of us lost our jobs.'' It has made a difference. And I'd
    like to say to all those who said it was a terrible thing, it would
    bring down the job growth of the American economy and ruin small
    business: You were wrong. This was the right thing to do.
        Our efforts to immunize all of the children in this country, to
    expand Head Start, to do what we can to expand child care, to strengthen
    child support enforcement, all these things are important to help you
    succeed, as people, as workers, as parents. But there is more that we
    should do. I have heard the recommendations. We cannot be satisfied
    until every person in this country has a chance to make the most of her
    God-given abilities.
        You recommended and I have proposed giving a tax deduction for all
    expenses for education after high school. That's very important. You
    know, most adults have to change jobs now during a lifetime, and many
    can be out of work for a long time, and many will not be able to get
    jobs paying what their old jobs paid unless they can get more education.
    This is a terribly important thing. I've said this over and over again,
    but the community colleges in our country may be the most important
    institutions in America today as we try to get into the 21st century,
    because they're handy, they're flexible, they change, they're driven by
    the local markets, and they're open to everybody. And we have to do what
    we can to increase the availability of education, not simply for working
    people to be able to provide it for their children but to be able to
    have it for themselves as well.
        You recommended and I also support streamlining the Federal job
    training programs. Now, there are 60 or 70 different job training
    programs, and I'm sure there was some reason that they were all passed
    separately. But today, most of you know where you need to go to get
    better training and education. So we want to collapse those, put them
    into a big pool, and let them become vouchers for unemployed people or
    very low-wage workers, so you can just use the money where you see fit,
    for a year and sometimes for 2 years, if you need it to get further
    education and training.
        You recommended and I support expanding more affordable loans for
    college students through the direct loan program. This will be very
    important to a lot of you and to a lot of your children. If a person
    borrows money to go to college, they ought never to be discouraged from
    going or from staying because of the burden of the loan. Under our
    proposal, you not only can get the loan at a more affordable rate but
    you can pay it back as a percentage of your income, so you'll never go
    broke trying to pay your college loan back. That's an important thing to
    America's women.
        Finally, you recommended and I support raising the minimum wage. I
    am very tired of hearing people say the only people on minimum wage are
    upper class college students who live with their wealthy parents and
    they don't need it. The other day on one of the local news programs, I
    was doing my little channel surfing and I saw they were doing a series
    on the minimum wage. And they went down to some town, I think it was in
    Virginia, and they interviewed a lady working for the minimum wage. She
    looked to be about my age. And the television reporter says, ``Well,
    ma'am, they say here in your factory that if the minimum wage is raised,
    that there will be fewer jobs. You might lose your job.'' She looked at
    the television reporter, and she said, ``Honey, I'll take my chances.''
    [Laughter]
        I don't believe you can support yourself and raise a child or more
    than a child on $8,500 a year. And we now have a--several years ago, we
    indexed the income taxes of the country so people weren't punished for
    making higher incomes with higher taxes. Now people in the Congress want
    to index the capital gains tax to protect the capital gains against
    inflation, and they want to index the defense budget to protect that
    against inflation. Why in the wide world wouldn't we want to protect
    against inflation the people who are working harder for the lowest money
    with kids to raise and a country to build? We ought to do this. It is
    time to do this.
        So, we've got a lot to do. You've given us some good
    recommendations. I also want to say that there are a lot of people who
    would like to be working women who aren't--people on welfare. There's a
    lot of talk in this town now about reforming the welfare system, and I
    am for it. I was pleased to hear the Speaker last

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    Friday say that he really wanted to get welfare reform out.
        But let us recognize what real welfare reform would be. It would be
    turning people who are permanently dependent into permanently successful
    workers who also are successful parents. That should be the goal of
    welfare reform. We should not punish people for the sins they committed
    in the past. Instead, we should say, we will help you if you will behave
    responsibly in the future as parents, as students, and as workers. If
    that is the focus of this welfare reform, believe me, there's a lot of
    reform that needs to be done.
        Everybody in this society, we ought to have the same goal for. And
    someday we ought to be able to have a meeting like this where men and
    women all have exactly the same problems and exactly the same
    opportunities, because what our goal should be is that all of us should
    be able to live up to our God-given capacities, to follow our dreams,
    and to succeed as citizens, as parents, and as workers. And unless we
    can do that, the American dream will not mean the same thing in the 21st
    century as it does today.
        For all the wonderful things that are going on, all the millions of
    jobs we have created, the fact that now we have more new businesses
    created every year than before, we've got more new millionaires every
    year than before, that's a good thing. But the world is changing so
    fast, there are a lot of people that are getting caught at the breaking
    points, and we've got to have an institutional response to give people
    the sense that they can preserve their families and preserve some order
    and stability in their lives, even as they are changing.
        Every one of you is entitled to that. That's what you are entitled
    to. And if you really count, that's what your country will give you.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:14 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive
    Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to working mother Marina
    Foley and Karen Nussbaum, Director of the Women's Bureau at the
    Department of Labor.