    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 26, 1995]
    [Pages 1489-1492]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Teleconference Remarks to the United Mine Workers
    September 26, 1995

        Thank you. Thank you, President Trumka, for that great introduction,
    and thank all of you for that wonderful welcome you just gave me. I got
    to know your president, Rich Trumka, well in 1992, when we were
    campaigning together in Pennsylvania, and I learned that we have a lot
    in common. He's a kid from a small town, born just after the end of
    World War II. He still likes fifties rock and roll. He's the first
    person in his family to go to college and to law school. And when he
    first ran for president, nobody but his mother thought he had a chance.
    But he kept plugging away in that modest, low-key way of his, and look
    where he is today. I'm also glad to be where he is today, and with him.
    I also want to acknowledge another friend from 1992, who helped show me
    around West Virginia, your vice president, Cecil Roberts, and your great
    secretary-treasurer, Jerry Jones, of Illinois. I'm sorry I couldn't be
    with you in person, but I am there in spirit.
        From your founding 105 years ago, the members of the United Mine
    Workers have always been the shock-troops of American labor. And I'm
    proud we're fighting today for the same things. If your brave founders
    could be with you today, they'd find another time of great change and
    great challenge for American workers. At the end of the 19th century,
    when your union got started, America was first entering the industrial
    age. Now we're the world's leading industrial power, and we're moving
    full-speed ahead into the global economy. Once again, we're challenged
    to make great decisions, decisions that will shape the lives of our
    children and our children's children.
        The industrial age brought us great opportunities, to be sure, but
    it also brought us child

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    labor, the sweatshops, the company towns and the company stores, and the
    working men and women in our factories who grew old before their time
    with injured bodies and broken spirits. That's why we built strong
    unions in our country and we built a caring Government to help Americans
    make the most of their own lives and to protect them from abuses from
    which they could not protect themselves. The unions build the middle
    class, and the middle class built America on the American dream.
        Now we find ourselves at another moment of great change. Even as we
    still depend upon the industrial might of coal miners and other workers,
    all of you know we're moving into an age characterized by information
    and technology and this new global economy that links more of us
    together economically but also presents extraordinary new pressures on
    ordinary working people everywhere.
        Our challenge is to recognize and embrace new ideas to preserve our
    vision for the future, a vision of high opportunity where the middle
    class is growing and the under class is shrinking, people have the
    opportunities to live up to their own God-given abilities, and families
    and communities have the ability to solve their own problems. We've got
    to hold on to that vision by holding on to the values which have always
    made this country great: freedom and responsibility, work and family,
    opportunity, and the idea that we are, as my friend Governor Chiles of
    Florida said the other day, we are a community, not a crowd.
        Now, a crowd is a collection of people who occupy the same space,
    just elbowing one another until the strongest and most powerful win,
    without regard of what happens to the others. A community is a group of
    people who occupy the same space, who believe that they're going up or
    down together, and that they have responsibilities to one another. The
    United Mine Workers has helped to keep America a community, and I thank
    you for that.
        You know, that's what this budget debate is really all about in
    Washington, whether the America of the 21st century will be a community,
    as we want it to be, or a crowd, as so many in the Republican majority
    in Congress want it to be. We need to stop looking for ways to be
    divided and start looking for ways to reach common ground and higher
    ground. We've got to be forward-thinking enough to stand up for the
    future, even if it's not popular in the present. But we've got to be
    sensible enough to hold on to those core values which have made this
    country what it is.
        The debate about the balanced budget is the biggest case in point.
    Let me be clear, I strongly favor balancing the budget to lift the
    burden of debt off our children and to strengthen our economy. But I
    think we have to do it in a way that is consistent with those basic
    values. We've got to give people a chance to make the most of their own
    lives. We've got to strengthen our families; we've got to protect our
    children; we must honor our parents. We have to do things that will grow
    the middle class and shrink the under class, not increase the insecurity
    of working families.
        These are the values we ought to be making decisions on about the
    budget. In my judgment, the congressional budget that the Republican
    majority has offered violates those values. We, the American people,
    need to be a part of this. We need to ask them basic questions. When we
    look at their budget, do we really want to support a budget that will
    deny 300,000 elderly people the right to be in the nursing homes they
    have today? Do we really want to eliminate all those quality standards
    for nursing homes? Can't anybody remember what it was like to go in
    those places when there were no quality standards? Do we really want to
    tax 17 million working families, increasing taxes on them to the point
    that many of them will be put back into poverty, even though they're
    working, and take that money and give a tax break to upper income people
    who don't need it and most of whom haven't asked for it?
        Do we really want to say to a woman whose husband has to go to a
    nursing home that ``in order for your husband to qualify for any
    Government assistance, you have to sell your car, your house; you have
    to spend all your life savings; you have to be totally impoverished''?
    Do we really want to make it harder for poor young children to get off
    to a good start in school? Do we want to make it harder for our schools
    to have smaller classes and computers, even in the poor areas? Do we
    want to make it more costly for young people to get college loans?
        Do we want to make fewer and fewer scholarships available so that
    more and more young people won't go to college and won't get good jobs
    with growing incomes? And do we want to let corporations loot their
    pension funds and compromise the retirement of their workers' fu-

    [[Page 1491]]

    ture? How can we forget--it was just a couple of years ago--when we had
    all these pension funds going broke? Just last December, I signed a bill
    that we passed through the last Congress to save the pensions of 8\1/2\
    million American workers and stabilize the pensions of 40 million more.
    Now, do we want to go along with the congressional budget plan to let
    corporations go and make that same mistake all over again and to loot
    their pension funds legally?
        Now, this budget does all those things. Those are the choices. If
    you want their budget in 7 years, with their tax cut and their
    assumptions and their plan, those are the choices in that budget. But
    there is another way. I have offered Congress a plan that balances the
    budget without destroying education, without undermining our commitment
    to the environment, and without violating our commitments to working
    families, the elderly, and our children.
        The budget debate forces us to answer a simple question: Do we want
    a Government that upholds our values as a community and stands on the
    side of working people, struggling to build better lives for themselves?
    I think the answer is yes. And that is exactly what I have been working
    to do.
        Two and a half years ago, you sent me to Washington to generate
    jobs, increase income, shrink the under class, grow the middle class,
    give America a better, stronger future. Since I started my job, our
    economy has created more than 7 million new jobs, 2\1/2\ million new
    homeowners, 2 million new small businesses. Unemployment is down 20
    percent. We're also cutting the deficit. You know, the deficit was $290
    billion when we started. It's down to $160 billion now. That's a 40
    percent cut, a cut for 3 years in a row, the best performance since
    Harry Truman was President.
        But you know better than anyone that we have a lot more to do to
    make sure America keeps working for and not against working families.
    That's why I fought for the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.
    That's why we gave a tax cut to 14 million working families with incomes
    under $28,000. That's why I support an increase in the minimum wage.
    That's why I proposed a new ``GI bill'' for America's workers, to give
    people a check or a voucher when they're unemployed or underemployed, so
    they can take the money and take it to a local community college or any
    other training program for up to 2 years to get the kind of training
    they decide they need.
        When people lose their jobs in this country today, too often the
    rest of our people walk away from them. And that's wrong. Our
    administration is pro-family, pro-worker, and pro-union. Right after I
    took office, I got rid of my predecessor's antiworker, antiunion
    Executive orders that weakened unions from public service to private
    industry.
        With an Executive order this spring, our administration said in no
    uncertain terms that we won't allow companies that do business with the
    Government to permanently replace striking workers. We want to make sure
    that if you're forced to exercise your right to strike, you won't be
    fired for it. Make no mistake about it, we believe collective bargaining
    is a right and firing striking workers is wrong.
        I've often spoken about how America has to keep faith with the
    people who work hard and play by the rules. That means we must honor our
    obligations to those who risk their lives to go beneath the earth and
    mine our coal. Your workplace is unique. It can change in an instant
    from one of safety to one of danger. That's why we need to keep the Mine
    Safety and Health Administration and maintain it as a separate agency.
        Under the outstanding leadership of Secretary Reich and Davitt
    McAteer, MSHA is enforcing the law, protecting workers, and saving
    lives. You know better than anyone that in the 25 years since Congress
    passed the Mine Safety Act, the deaths in the coal mines have decreased
    by 77 percent. Now there are those in Congress who want to destroy MSHA,
    to limit inspections in unsafe mines and leave miners out in the cold
    who dare to blow the whistle and stand up for safety.
        Well, there are no coal mines in Washington, DC, and here, sometimes
    the voice of big money can shout down the voice of the people. That's
    why it is so important when United Mine Workers miners and Rich Trumka
    come to the Capital, as they did, to tell why saving MSHA is literally a
    matter of life and death. And that's why I will fight and fight against
    any bill to cut or gut MSHA.
        Keeping faith with people who have worked hard all their lives also
    means protecting coal miner retirees' health care, as guaranteed in the
    Rockefeller act, also known as the coal act. The coal act is our
    country's solemn covenant with

    [[Page 1492]]

    more than 100,000 retired miners and their families to protect their
    health benefits and their peace of mind. It is not a matter of
    partisanship. This act was signed into law by President Bush and is
    supported to this day by the major coal companies.
        Yesterday, you heard the author of that act, Senator Jay
    Rockefeller, explain how it is threatened and how it must be maintained.
    Today, let me tell you, we're going to fight to preserve your health
    benefits as guaranteed in the coal act.
        Let me close by saying that I understand what's at stake as we fight
    to protect the health and safety of coal miners. When I was a young
    lawyer in Arkansas, just out of law school, back in the early 1970's, I
    handled several black lung cases for retired coal miners who could
    breathe only with great difficulty after a lifetime in the mines.
        Some of the folks from MSHA found a letter that was found on the
    body of a coal miner who died in a mine explosion in Tennessee. Although
    a barricade held out the bad air for over 7 hours, the trapped miners
    eventually succumbed to the suffocating gas. Here is what the miner,
    Jacob Vowell, wrote to his wife, Ellen:
        ``Ellen, darling, goodbye for us both. We're all praying for air to
    support us, but it's getting bad without any air.
        ``Ellen, I want you to live right and come to heaven. Raise the
    children as best you can. Oh, how I wish to be with you. It's 25 minutes
    after 2. There are a few of us alive yet. Oh, God, for one more breath.
    Ellen, remember me for as long as you live.
        ``Goodbye, darling.''
        That letter was written 93 years ago. Today, thanks to the United
    Mine Workers, a better America, and the grace of God, our miners are
    working in greater safety and living with greater dignity.
        The future of our Nation depends upon rewarding the efforts of
    people like you with safety, prosperity, and dignity. You and your
    families and the millions and millions of working families like you, you
    are heart and soul of the American dream. We have to keep working
    together not just to preserve what's been won but to continue to fight
    for better jobs, better wages, and more justice.
        The 21st century can be America's greatest time. Our children and
    our grandchildren can enjoy more freedom, more opportunity if we do what
    is right. But we can't let the people in Washington who are trying to do
    it, turn back the clock. We have to keep America moving forward, strong,
    proud, and united, in the words of your own banner. Let's stay that way
    and march into the 21st century victorious for the values of ordinary
    Americans.
        God bless you, and thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke by satellite at 2:15 p.m. from Room 459 in the
    Old Executive Office Building to the United Mine Workers convention in
    Miami, FL.