[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.