[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.