[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.