    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [March 8, 1996]
    [Pages 396-402]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to Harman International Industries Employees in Northridge,
    California
    March 8, 1996

        Thank you very much. If you have a seat, please take it. Thank you
    very much, Bertha. She said that she was nervous before she spoke, but I
    think she did a terrific job, don't you? When she told me that she'd
    been here 30 years, I thought that the company must have violated the
    child labor laws when she was hired. [Laughter] But I'll take her word
    for it.
        I want to thank Dr. Sidney Harman for that fine statement that he
    made. And I thank Sidney and Congresswoman Jane Harman for riding out
    with me this morning. We did come out on Air Force One; we did talk for
    an hour. Actually, what we did for an hour was I listened to him rave
    about you. That's what he talked about. He talked about how great you
    were, how creative you were, how you had proved his faith in the United
    States and in California and in the proposition that people from all
    different walks of life could work together in a common enterprise. And
    you would have been very proud if you had heard him talk about you this
    morning in the privacy of our conversation.
        I want to thank the State and local officials who are here today,
    and most of all, I want to thank you for giving me a chance to share
    some time with you. When I was Governor for 12 years before I moved to
    Washington, I spent, I suppose, more hours in factories and schools than
    anything else I did. I think I visited at least an average of a factory
    a week in the 12 years I was Governor. And I went through the terrible,
    difficult times of the 1980's for manufacturing in America, and I
    watched it come back. So my attention has been riveted on the whole
    question of how people produce and when in America for a very long time
    now.
        I'm honored to be back in Northridge. I was here, of course, shortly
    after the earthquake devastated you 2 years ago, and I was struck by the
    spirit and the determination of the people here; even more remarkably,
    by the way the community pulled together to rebuild. And I can't help
    but acknowledging another thing that Dr. Harman told me this morning,
    which was that you were back up and running here about 3 days after the
    earthquake because all the employees came back in and cleaned it up and
    moved it forward. And that is a truly astonishing accomplishment, and I
    want to compliment you

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    on that as well. You should be very proud of that.
        I'm also glad that the National Government was here, quickly, to be
    of help in the earthquake--the emergency management agency, the Small
    Business Administration, the Housing and Urban Development Department,
    the Transportation Department. We were doing what I think Americans do
    best; we were working together.
        If I can tell you on the front end, the one point I want to make
    today is that whether it's in an earthquake, after another natural
    disaster, or working day to day in a facility like this one, that's how
    we have to meet the challenges that we face today as a people. We are
    going to meet them by working together if we're going to succeed.
        We have to prove in the United States that it doesn't matter what
    your racial or ethnic or religious background, where you come from, or
    even what you start with, if you start with nothing; that if we all work
    together with the goal of making sure every single person in this
    country has a chance to live the American dream, that everybody has a
    chance to be treated in a fair and equal way, and that we can work and
    raise good families and have successful children and have strong
    communities--the only way we can do that is if we're committed to
    working together. In this time of great transition, teamwork, a respect
    for one another, and a commitment to seeing everybody succeed is more
    important than it has ever been in your lifetime. And that is my
    commitment to you. Our whole country needs to work together every day
    the way you work together here every single day.
        Four years ago when I sought the job that the American people were
    good enough to give me, I made a commitment. I said that I was convinced
    that if we would work together to get this economy going again, and if
    we in Washington could do our part by bringing the deficit down and
    getting interest rates down, by investing in our people and education
    and training, by investing in new technologies and helping places like
    California to convert from a defense-based economy to a more diversified
    economy in the wake of the end of the cold war, if we open new markets
    based on trade that was fair and free, that our economy would respond
    and create 8 million jobs in 4 years. It is a tribute to the hard work
    and the ingenuity of the American people and to our uncommon partnership
    that we announced officially today that the United States economy has
    created 8.4 million jobs in 3 years. And I am very proud of that.
        And let me put that in some sort of perspective for you. I hear
    people say all the time that, well, even if we create new jobs they're
    not very good jobs. That's just not true. These 8.4 million jobs
    represent more new jobs than were created in all of Europe and Japan
    combined. And increasingly, they are in higher wage industries. By the
    end of December, our economy had created 7.7 million new jobs; 3.3
    million of them were higher wage jobs. Four years ago only 20 percent of
    our new jobs were in high-wage jobs. In 1995, well over half of the new
    jobs created in our economy were higher wage paying jobs. We can create
    good jobs for the American people if we work together.
        I am very glad to be here today to make this announcement for three
    reasons. First of all, I have enormous respect for Dr. Harman and for
    Congresswoman Jane Harman. They have the sort of partnership that is
    much admired in the Clinton household by not only the President but by
    the First Lady. We admire the way Sidney has combined a commitment to
    innovative ideas and being at the cutting edge of new products with a
    commitment to the success of all of you, the people who work for Harman,
    and your families and this community.
        And I very much admire the work that Congresswoman Jane Harman has
    done in the United States Congress. She is, I think, the best of a new
    breed of political leaders who want to see our country go beyond the old
    division of stale, partisan political debates to find creative ways for
    Government to work with you to create better jobs and brighter futures
    for all Americans. If every person in the Congress had the same sort of
    practical yet idealistic approach that she does, willing to discard all
    the kind of hot air that we hear too much of in Washington, this country
    would be in better shape today. And I thank her for her service as well.
    Thank you.
        But the most important reason I wanted to come here, even though I
    can't afford a Jaguar to get one of those fancy speakers you make that
    go in them--[laughter]--is because I respect what you are doing. I
    respect all of you who work here in all your various roles because you
    have proved that by working together as a team, you can create the
    world's best stereo

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    and electronic equipment, and you can help to move our country forward
    while you make your own lives better.
        I'd like to talk just a minute today about the nature of all these
    changes that are transforming our economy and what we can do to make all
    Americans winners in this period of change; about what Government can do
    and about what people like you must do, employers and employees alike,
    to move our country forward.
        Harman International shows how a cutting-edge company can do well
    while doing right by its people. That's why I wanted Bertha to talk
    today as well. A company that believes employees are the most important
    asset; a company that, when layoffs are necessary, workers are given a
    chance to find other work within the company. Workers are fully trained
    to keep up with new skills. And this is one I especially like: Senior
    executives work the production line 18 days a year so they'll know what
    the rest of you are experiencing.
        While others may have downsized and even moved away from our country
    and taken the jobs with them, Harman has stayed true to Northridge. And
    their new factory within a factory that we--I've heard about for the
    first time today is a true testament to a commitment to community and to
    the bond that should exist in every workplace in America between
    employers and employees. It shows how the transforming power of
    technology can create new opportunity. So many Americans are threatened
    by the technological changes that are going on today, but believe me, if
    we do the right things we will generate far more jobs from technology
    than we will ever lose because of it. And you are proving that as well.
        When you make audio equipment for computers that rivals the sound
    quality of a stereo, you're making the promise of the information
    superhighway real. With better products and more productivity, more jobs
    and good profits, Harman shows us that our leading edge toward the 21st
    century is the people of the American work force and that if we work
    together we can boost our competitiveness, push ever upward the American
    standard for excellence, and also open the American dream to every
    single person who is willing to work for it. That is your commitment.
    That is my commitment. That must be America's commitment.
        Now, all of you know from your own experience that this
    extraordinary period of change is transforming the way we work and the
    way we live. I watched it in your assembly lines, the couple you left
    open for me today while the rest of you were here. I have now been in
    American factories for nearly 30 years, looking at them, learning how
    people work, seeing how people work together. There's a lot more mind
    and a lot less muscle in manufacturing work than there used to be. The
    information revolution has made it possible for there to be far fewer
    layers of bureaucracies in most thriving companies than there used to
    be.
        We are changing the way we work. We are changing the way we
    structure the workplace. And the information revolution has also made
    possible global markets for information, for money, for products, and
    for services. That means things are changing very rapidly, and change
    brings good things, but it is also always, always disruptive. And there
    are a lot of Americans whose lives have been disrupted by this time of
    change. Many of them feel that they've been uprooted, and they wonder,
    even though they have carried their traditional values of hard work and
    family close to their heart, they wonder if they're going to be left
    behind.
        We have to deal with that challenge. But it's important how we deal
    with that challenge. I submit to you the way to deal with it is to build
    on what works, on models like Harman International, on the economic
    policy we have implemented. We cannot turn back to try to recover a past
    that is not there anymore. We have to keep going into the future until
    every single person has a chance to work in a workplace where everyone
    is winning. That is the way to a better future.
        Let me say to all of you, we have been through a period of change
    like this not very often. But we have done it before. The last time the
    American economy changed as much as it's changing now was about 100
    years ago when we moved from the farm to the factory. A hundred years
    ago, most people were living in rural areas; they moved to towns and
    cities. Most people were working on farms or in jobs that depended on
    farmers; then they began to work in factories or in jobs that depended
    on factories.
        When that happened, there was a great deal of ferment and change.
    Millions of new immigrants came to America. Many, many people did better
    than they had ever done before. But for a period of years, there was a
    great uproot-

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    ing and a lot of people didn't do so well, either, as they were
    displaced. But because we kept pushing through and pushing ahead and
    learning new ways to work together, to do the right thing by people as
    well as to do well economically, to push profits and productivity and
    fairness--because we did that, we created in the 20th century a nation
    with the greatest period of unparalleled prosperity ever known, a nation
    with the greatest middle class ever created, a nation with the greatest
    dreams for children ever forged. That is what we have to do today.
        When I took office, we put in place a comprehensive strategy to try
    to create a modern economy. We didn't want to deny change and try to
    hold back for a past we couldn't recover. Neither did we want to say,
    well, we ought to just let whatever is going to happen, happen, and let
    whatever happens to people happen.
        I knew that we couldn't go back to the time when all Americans were
    told, ``You've got to fend for yourself.'' So we put in a strategy,
    first, to cut the deficit and get the interest rates down; second, to
    invest in education and training for people; third, to open new
    markets--to have free trade, yes, but also fair trade to enable
    Americans to sell their products all over the world as you do, and to
    invest in the new technologies of the future in partnership with the
    private sector.
        It has worked. We cut the deficit in half. Exports are at an all-
    time high. Homeownership is at a 15-year high. We've had 3 years of
    record formations of new businesses in each of the last 3 years. And we
    did it while shrinking the size of the Federal Government to its
    smallest size in 30 years. And it is working. This strategy is working.
        Just think about where we were 4 years ago. Our economy was
    drifting. Now we've had 8.4 million jobs in 3 years and 1 month. We have
    the lowest combined rates of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgage
    rates in 27 years. Four years ago construction and auto industries were
    flat on their backs. Today, we've had about 700,000 new jobs in America
    in construction, and the automobile industry, for the first time in many
    years, is selling more cars than Japan. I am proud of that, and you
    should be too.
        It is true that in many large companies there has been substantial
    downsizing. But it is also true that in the areas of new opportunity,
    millions of new jobs are being created. Just a few days ago I signed the
    telecommunications bill into law which will create vast new
    opportunities for Americans and American companies to increase
    information, education, and entertainment. And the last economic
    analysis I showed estimated that that bill alone, with the energies of
    the American telecommunications sector, would create 3\1/2\ million new
    jobs over the next few years. That is what we should be doing more of.
        Four years ago, California had lost about 170,000 jobs. Today,
    California businesses in the last 3 years have created almost a half a
    million new jobs. Business failures are down; new businesses are up.
    Industries like aerospace and entertainment and computers are leading
    the world with new markets, new production, new products, helping to
    overcome the terrible burden that California bore because of a good
    thing that happened: The cold war ended. And we were able to downsize
    our national defense, but it caused great economic dislocation here. By
    emphasizing the resources, the strength, the people of the State of
    California and focusing on the opportunities of the future, the
    turnaround has begun, and it will get better.
        As I said, you can say all you want about how Government is the
    problem. I accept the fact that in times past Government has been a
    problem. We have shrunk the Government to its smallest size in 30 years.
    But we dare not go back to a time when people were left to fend for
    themselves. It is the Government that helps to open those markets. It is
    the Government that helps to invest in people and help working families
    send their children to college. It is the Government that helps provide
    opportunities like Head Start for families that need help getting their
    kids off to a good start in life. I am proud of those things.
        As I said in my State of the Union Address, I think there are seven
    big challenges we have to meet now if we're going to fulfill our
    mission, if all Americans are going to have a chance to have the
    American dream, if we're going to be able to raise strong families in
    good communities with good values, if we're going to continue to lead
    the world.
        We have to do more to strengthen our families and give all of our
    children a decent childhood. We have to do more to improve our schools
    and open the doors of college education to all Americans. We have to do
    more to give working families the security they need with health care
    and pensions and training that they

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    can have even if they have to change jobs. We have to do more to fight
    crime and drugs and gangs so that violence will become the exception
    rather than the rule. I'd like to live in an America again when people
    are surprised when they turn on the evening news and there's been an act
    of violence as the lead story.
        We have to do more to preserve our environment and to convince
    ourselves--all of us--that we can preserve the environment and grow the
    economy. I have to tell you that one of the side benefits of what you do
    with your Ole program in using your extra materials to build those
    clocks is that you're using something for a productive purpose that
    doesn't just go to a scrap heap. And I appreciate that. That also is
    contributing to the environment while growing the economy and helping
    people deal with the problems of economic change.
        The Congress has more to do, and I challenge the Congress to pass
    another growth budget for the next 60 days to keep this economy going.
    We ought to finish the job. We've cut the deficit in half; we ought to
    go on and pass a balanced budget plan. But it should be the right kind
    of plan. We can eliminate this deficit without devastating cuts in
    Medicare and Medicaid, without undermining our obligation to you to
    invest in education, in research, and environmental protection. That's
    what I want to do.
        There are millions of good Americans out there who aren't as
    fortunate as you are to have a job here, millions of them trying to
    raise children on the minimum wage. If we don't raise the minimum wage
    this year, it will fall to a 40-year low in terms of what it will buy
    within a year. We ought to raise the minimum wage. You can't raise a
    family on $4.25 an hour.
        And there is a bill in Congress now called the Kennedy-Kassebaum
    bill which would give American workers and their families an important
    protection; it says that you don't lose your health insurance just
    because you change jobs or somebody in your family gets sick. That bill
    ought to pass, and it ought to pass immediately. It's an important part
    of dealing with the change.
        There is more that we ought to do. I have asked the Congress to
    collapse about 70 different education and training programs that
    unemployed Americans have to figure out how they fit into, or some State
    and local official has to figure out how they fit into, if they lose a
    job. I'd like to see all those programs collapsed into a big pile of
    money, and when somebody loses their job, I think they ought to get a
    voucher from the Government worth $2,600 a year that they can take to
    the nearest community college or other training institution to get the
    training they need--a ``GI bill'' for America's workers. I believe it's
    an important thing.
        And there's a lot of talk about tax cuts in Washington. Three years
    ago, we cut taxes on the lowest income working families through a
    doubling of what's called the earned-income tax credit. This year, every
    family in America with children with an income of under $28,000 will
    have a considerably lower income tax burden than they would have had if
    we hadn't changed the law back in 1993.
        There are other things that I'd like to see done. I think we ought
    to give some relief to families with children. But the most important
    tax cut we could give is the one that I have proposed to give families a
    tax deduction for up to $10,000 of the cost of college tuition and other
    education after high school. That would really help working families.
        There are some other things that the Government ought to do in
    partnership with businesses and schools. One of the most important thing
    we have done--things we've done since I became President involved an act
    called the School-to-Work Act, signed in 1994, to help to create a
    national network of programs that would give young people who don't go
    on to 4-year colleges the opportunity to get work experience and
    learning experience at the same time, to abolish what I think is an
    artificial distinction between what is vocational learning on the job
    and what is academic learning. What a lot of you are doing looked pretty
    academic to me, at least; I don't believe I could do it without a lot of
    training.
        Businesses work with schools and community colleges and universities
    and technical schools to design courses while they open their workplaces
    and provide on-the-job training. This has helped us over the past year
    and a half to generate activity involving 42,000 employers and 116,000
    young people in learning new skills in 42 of our 50 States. And today
    the Departments of Education and Labor announced another 37 communities,
    including 7 here in California, will be receiving more school-to-work
    investments to enable them to train more young people so they can move
    from school into a job with the prospect of a growing income and a
    brighter future

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    instead of into a job that they may not be able to hold or may never get
    a raise in. That is the sort of partnerships that I think we need more
    of.
        Our strategy has been to enable the private sector to generate this
    growth. Keep in mind, these 8.4 million new jobs have come into our
    economy at a time when we have reduced the size of the Federal
    Government by more than 200,000.
        We are trying to work with you to help generate jobs here in the
    private sector in places like Harman International. We know that means
    that business has an even more important role in the future in terms of
    what your life is like, in terms of whether you have security in return
    for your work, in terms of whether you have a chance to go on and find
    other opportunities if something happens in the market and it goes bad.
    And this is a difficult time for business because people who run
    businesses face enormous new challenges. If they have to compete for
    investment money, they know that money can be put anywhere in the world
    in a split second with a wire transfer. They know that technology can be
    put anywhere in the world. And that means that they're under more and
    more pressure always to be changing the nature of the products, always
    to be upgrading the quality of the products, always trying to produce
    more with fewer inputs of cost, whether it's labor or technology.
        Sidney told me on the way out here today that the labor costs in
    your products are only about a third of what they were just a few years
    ago because you're all so much more productive because you're using more
    machinery, because you're working in more efficient ways.
        These new pressures put great challenges before the business leaders
    of our country to be not only productive and profitable, to be good
    citizens not only for their shareholders or their investors but also for
    their customers and their employees and their families, their
    communities, and the natural environment.
        Since I became President I've tried to go around from time to time
    to places like this to celebrate companies that are both profitable and
    competitive on the one hand and good citizens on the other. And I've
    tried to do things that would support policies that would help our
    companies to do a good job. It is especially important when changes in
    the economy bring instability and uncertainty that we lift up the
    companies that are trying to help people deal with it.
        Now, consider this: Since most parents work, one of the most
    important things is to help people succeed at home and at work. And all
    of you--I bet every working parent out there has felt some tension at
    some time in your life when your children were sick or there were
    problems at school or something else happened. The great challenge of
    our society--there is no more important work than raising children. That
    is still every parent's most important job. So unless we can find ways
    for people to succeed as parents and in the workplace, the country can't
    be as strong as it ought to be.
        A lot of businesses are trying to accommodate this by things like
    flexible work hours or child care centers at or near the places of
    business. The family and medical leave law, the very first law I signed
    as President of the United States, helped about 300,000 California
    workers take a little time off from work for a sick child or a sick
    parent or when a baby was born without losing their jobs. That's a very
    important thing as well.
        Health care benefits and retirement benefits are important. Training
    is important. Education is important. One of the things I've been so
    impressed about is the training programs that you have here. You know,
    in a lot of our military activities now, we regularly give annual
    training programs to all the people involved in them because the needs
    are changing and also because we want those people to be able to succeed
    even after they leave uniform. That is terribly important.
        The other thing that I think is very important is to find the best
    possible way for companies to share the good times as well as the bad
    times. And that is something that I think you have done a remarkable job
    of. I am so impressed by the way programs like--well, like this Ole
    program of yours works--to have the opportunity when the market goes
    down for the product you're producing to be called back to find
    innovative ways not only to produce, but I understand some of you have
    even worked as salespeople selling your own products, trying to find
    ways to keep people busy so that you can not only maintain benefits but
    a livelihood. That is walking the extra mile, but that's a good thing to
    do.
        People are the most important--the most important--element in a
    production process today.

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    The technology can be anywhere. We could pack all this technology up
    today and fly it to some other country. The people and how they work
    together and whether they feel good on the job and whether they feel a
    loyalty to the enterprise and whether they think everybody is being
    treated fairly, that is the secret of America's future success. You are
    the secret of America's future success.
        And what this company has done is what every company should strive
    to do within the limits of their capacity because if we don't treat our
    people right and they don't feel good about the work enterprise--or to
    use Dr. Harman's words, the old employer bargain used to be less for
    less. When the industrial revolution first started, people got paid as
    little as the employer could get away with paying them, and the workers
    did as little as they could get away with doing without getting fired.
    He says what you're trying to get is a more-for-more bargain. You get
    paid as much as they can afford to pay you and you're expected to do as
    much as you can possibly do, and even in the down times, there is the
    other enterprise, a sort of factory within a factory. That is a
    remarkable thing.
        And I hope by coming here today and by having people learn about
    what you're doing, that all over America, people will ask themselves,
    ``I wonder if I could do something like that. I wonder if that would
    help increase the security my workers feel. I wonder if that would
    strengthen the families of the people that work here. I wonder if that
    wouldn't improve our long-term productivity. Wouldn't it be nice if I
    could find a way to keep all my workers, year-in and year-out, even in
    the down times.''
        It's just one solution, but it's a solution that deserves to be
    considered all across America. And just by your being here and by my
    being able to tell your story today, you may be helping to save not only
    a lot of jobs in the future and other parts of America but also the
    vitality and the productivity and the profitability of other American
    companies. We have to learn from each other, and we could all learn a
    lot from you, and I thank you for that.
        So that's the point I want to make. This economy has a lot of
    possibility. I believe that your children will grow up in the period of
    greatest possibility any generation of Americans has ever known. There
    will be more opportunities for young boys and girls as they grow up to
    live out their dreams than ever before. I believe technology will prove
    to be a great equalizer, giving people across racial and ethnic divides,
    giving children who grew up in poor households as well as those who grow
    up in middle class and wealthy households the opportunity to learn and
    grow and do things they could never have otherwise done.
        But all this will happen only if we find ways to work together. The
    Government has a role to play, but the jobs are being created in the
    private sector. We can create the environment; we can create the
    incentives; we can try to deal with the places which don't have any real
    improvement yet--that's what we tried to do when we gave to Los Angeles
    the $400 million to set up a development bank to make investments in the
    neighborhoods there where there are no new jobs. We can do extra things
    like that. But in the end, whether the businesses work, employers and
    employees working together, family-friendly workplaces, health care,
    pensions, training, sharing the burdens and the benefits of the year-to-
    year ups and downs of the company, keeping the workplace safe and
    hearing the workers' voices as well; all of these things which you have
    done here are things we need more of in every American workplace.
        And if we do this, then we will create the kind of opportunities
    millions of Americans are now enjoying for every American willing to
    work for it. That is the answer: to work together and forge into the
    future, not to try to turn back, or not to say to people, ``You're on
    your own, I hope you do well.'' It's to work together, join together,
    and move into the future together. Your success is the model for
    America's success, and I am determined to see that we follow it.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:28 p.m. on the factory floor. In his
    remarks, he referred to Bertha Torres, employee, and Sidney Harman,
    chief executive officer, Harman International Industries.