    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [January 28, 1999]
    [Pages 117-121]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Employment Initiative in Oakton, Virginia
    January 28, 1999

        Thank you. I would say this is a fairly high energy crowd here
    today. [Laughter] Thank you for making us all feel so welcome. Thank
    you, Cheryl Simms. She was nervous as a cat.
    [Laughter] And I said, ``Look, Cheryl, that

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    microphone, it will carry your voice. Just pretend you're talking to a
    friend or two.'' And I think she did a fine job, don't you? Let's give
    her a hand. [Applause]
        I'd like to thank Mirian Graddick and
    Mary Jane McKeever for making us feel so
    welcome here today. I thank Secretary Herman and Secretary Riley for their
    wonderful work on the announcements I am about to make. I want to thank
    my longtime friend Senator Chuck Robb for
    being a terrific Senator for the State of Virginia and on education
    issues for all the United States.
        And I'd like to recognize two Members of the House of
    Representatives who are here who have been very, very active on these
    issues, Congressman Tim Roemer from Indiana and
    Representative Dennis Kucinich from
    Cleveland, Ohio. Thank you for being here, both of you.
        I also want to thank the Vice President
    for his interest in this. Not very long ago, just a couple of weeks ago,
    he convened a national meeting with business, education, labor, and
    government leaders to come up with proposals that will further our
    efforts to promote lifelong learning.
        I want to say one other thing. There is a member of my staff who
    worked very hard on this who is leaving the White House, but she had a
    lot to do with this announcement I'm making today. Her name is Cecilia
    Rouse, and she's going back to be a professor.
    But I wish she were staying with us. Thank you very much, Cecilia, for
    what you've done.
        I wanted to come here because this is a picture--a picture I hope
    will be in newspapers all across America tomorrow. I hope this picture
    will be on some television stations tonight. I want Americans to be able
    to visualize the kind of continuing lifelong learning opportunities that
    you have that I want for all Americans.
        I want to compliment AT&T, the CWA, the IBEW, and Lucent
    Technologies. This workers alliance, I was told, since its inception in
    the mideighties has given way over 100,000 people the chance to come
    through here and get education and training. That is profoundly
    important. And it's important not just for people who work for AT&T, who
    are in the communications business.
        I recently learned about a man in my home State who was 50 years
    old, had an eighth grade education, ran a conveyor belt for a company
    that converted to a new computerized transport system. Since he only had
    an eighth grade education, he was computerphobic, to say the least, and
    he was afraid that he would lose his job. Instead, he enrolled in a
    training program, learned how to use computers, improved his reading and
    math skills so that he could master complex technical manuals. And
    instead of losing his job, he got a raise.
        Now, a lot of you have been through more than one training program
    since you've been employed. I just met a gentleman who said he spent
    over 300 hours in this program, in alliance programs. And if you think
    about how almost every form of work today is different from what it was
    just a few years ago and how rapidly the nature of work is changing, we
    are going to be challenged to change our whole conception of what
    education is.
        You know, a lot of you came from families like mine. I mean, my
    grandfather had a grade-school education; my stepfather, who raised me,
    didn't finish high school; my mother went to nursing school, never went
    to college; my father's uncle, who served three terms in the
    legislature, dropped out of school after the eighth grade to support the
    family. They all did just fine. Now--and all you have to do is look at
    the census data; you don't just have to tell family stories--if you look
    at the census data, high school graduates are likely to get jobs where
    their incomes drop over time, not go up. People who have the equivalent
    of at least 2 years of college and can keep on learning for a lifetime
    are likely to get jobs where their incomes go up and, if they lose their
    jobs, to find jobs that are as good or better.
        So what we have now is a situation in America where the income gap,
    that we all know widened over the previous 20 years or so, is largely a
    skills gap and that it applies across all kinds of industries. We have
    to close that skills gap.
        In 1992, when I took office, I said we had two deficits. We had a
    budget deficit and an investment deficit in our people. Well, thanks to
    Senator Robb and the Members of the House
    that are here, we've closed the budget deficit; we've got a surplus. But
    we still have a deficit in investment in our people. We have got to find
    a way to create in America, not only world-class public schools and
    access to college education--and you may have heard me say in the State
    of the Union Address that with the tax credits, the Pell grants, and the
    other things, no one should ever fail to go to college because

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    of the cost, now--but we have to create a situation in America where
    people can keep on learning for a lifetime, without regard to where they
    live, what their job is, what their income is.
        Why? Well, just a couple of statistics. In manufacturing, 88 percent
    of the companies--I want to say that again--88 percent of the companies
    say they're having trouble finding qualified applicants to fill at least
    one kind of job in their operation. One in five companies says, today,
    it literally cannot expand its operation, even though the markets are
    there, because they don't have workers with the right skills.
        You heard, I think, the Senator said that there are jobs going
    begging right here in the DC area. You've got high unemployment in DC,
    job vacancies in the communities outside. In America as a whole, there
    are over a quarter of a million high-tech jobs, computer-related jobs,
    vacant this day. We may have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years,
    but we've got a quarter of a million high wage jobs going vacant this
    day.
        And there are places where the economic recovery hasn't hit, because
    people can't get the investment or because they don't have the skills to
    do these jobs.
        Now, that's really why I wanted to come here. I want America to work
    like this place does. I want there to be an American alliance. I want
    workers who aren't lucky enough to be represented by the CWA or the IBEW
    to have access to lifetime learning. I want employers who may not have
    the resources of AT&T or Lucent Technologies to know that there is some
    way they can work with their employees to give them access to these kind
    of skills.
        And in the State of the Union Address I just barely mentioned this,
    and so I wanted to come here to tell you the things, the specific things
    that I intend to propose that are in our budget. First, we need a
    national campaign to dramatically increase our efforts at basic adult
    education and family literacy, to help the millions and millions of
    adults who struggle with basic reading or math.
        People that cannot fill out a job application cannot be expected to
    fill a 21st century job. You know, when Alexis told that old Getty
    joke--I love that--rise early, work hard, strike oil. It's good; it
    keeps us humble, reminds you there's a little bit of luck in life.
    [Laughter] But the oil today is in your noggin, not in the ground. And
    everybody can strike oil today. But they have to have the means to do
    it.
        This country has been greatly enriched, particularly by our
    immigrant populations. But I went to a school not very long ago,
    Senator, in Virginia, and they asked me in advance if there was any way
    we had time to have consecutive translation of my remarks, first in
    Spanish and then in Arabic, so the parents of the children at the school
    would understand the speech I was giving to their kids.
        Now, I can tell you in a global economy this is not a bad deal; this
    is a good deal. But it is not a good deal when you think about--it's
    going to be hard enough for us all to understand our different racial
    and ethnic and cultural and religious traditions and figure out how to
    get all that together, if we can't even read one another's words or
    understand each other and if a certain group of people are locked out of
    the whole new economy, not because they're not intelligent and not
    because they don't work like crazy but because they literally can't plug
    in because their mind doesn't have the connections. And that is very,
    very important.
        So we're going to seek new tax credits for businesses like the two
    that sponsored the alliance, which provide basic skills to their
    workers. And we will work to greatly expand the funding for basic adult
    education and high school completion programs. You read all these
    stories about inner cities, where there are all these young single
    people, unemployed. Nearly all of them dropped out of high school. And
    it's going to be difficult to get some of them into some of the training
    programs we want unless we can get them to come back and finish high
    school, get their GED, and then go forward. And so this is a very, very
    important thing.
        Secondly, I'm going to recommend a large new investment in the
    worker training system we revolutionized last year. You heard previous
    speakers mention it. But basically what we did was to take all these
    Government programs, 40 or 50 of them, collapse them into a single
    skills grant and one-stop shopping, so that if somebody is eligible
    right now for Federal help and training, instead of having to go to this
    program, that program, the other program, they go to one place, get a
    skills grant, and they can decide how to spend the money, where it is
    most likely to give them the training that will most likely give them a
    job.

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        But the program is underfunded today. It will not cover all the
    people who need it. So over the next 5 years I've asked for funds
    sufficient for us to be able to provide appropriate training and
    reemployment services for all Americans who lose their jobs--all
    Americans. Now, next year we will increase the funding for skill grants,
    high-tech community career centers, and rapid response teams by more
    than $360 million under our budget.
        Third, I want to greatly increase our programs and our commitment to
    helping disadvantaged young people. We'll nearly double the funding for
    YouthBuild, an innovative program that gives young people a chance to
    learn construction skills to build homes for low income families, on the
    job. We will double the funding for our GEAR UP program, one of my
    favorite programs; it's a mentoring and tutoring initiative I mentioned
    earlier, which involves sending college students out into middle schools
    to mentor students, to get them to both learn their lessons and stay in
    school but also to raise their sights and believe no matter how poor
    their circumstances, they can go on to college and do well. And it's a
    great program.
        We are also going to continue our investments in what we call youth-
    opportunity areas, to try to go into these areas where there are a lot
    of kids just walking the streets, and there aren't any jobs, to try to
    get these kids off the streets--either back in the schools, or into
    jobs. If we cannot deal with the challenges faced by these young people
    now, with the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the first budget
    surplus in 30 years and the smallest percentage of the American people
    on welfare in 29 years, we will never get around to doing this. Now is
    the time for us to try to bring these young people into the mainstream
    of American life.
        We also are going to try to expand more partnerships. You have
    proved here that it takes people working together to make something like
    this go. We have a new initiative called ``Right-Track Partnerships,''
    to help schools, businesses, and community organizations work together
    to reduce teen dropout rates and to help former dropouts come back,
    building on what we did last year, directed especially toward Hispanic
    young people, because the dropout there is far higher than for any group
    in America.
        Let me just tell you, though, you all know that we need more than a
    high school education to do what you guys are doing; so even if you
    didn't have one once, with all the training programs, you've got to have
    more. In 1989, 10 years ago this coming fall, I met with all the other
    Governors and the then-President of the United States, George Bush, to
    set some national education goals. One of our goals was that we would
    have an on time high school completion rate of 90 percent. That was one
    of our goals.
        We knew that some people would drop out regardless, you know, that
    just would happen. In 1989--well, 1998, last year, a wonderful thing
    happened. For the first time since we've been keeping these statistics,
    the last 20 or 30 years, the on-time African-American high school
    graduation rate was almost identical to the on-time high school
    graduation rate of white children. It was about--between 83 and 84
    percent. That's the good news.
        There's two pieces of bad news. Bad news piece number one is it's
    not 90 percent. And that's 16, 17 percent of the people we have to
    figure out how to get back to school and how to get education and
    training. And for Hispanic young people, many of whom have language
    barriers that cause them after the eighth grade not to be able to keep
    up, the dropout rate is still over 40 percent. So we must do more here.
        And it's something I'd like to ask you all to think about. And here
    in Virginia, northern Virginia, you've got a lot of young people from
    all over the world, as the school districts get increasingly diverse--
    these kids have fine minds, but it will be harder for them, and the
    longer they go on in school without a complete mastery of English and
    access to learning, the more the difficult courses will become more out
    of reach. And if they get bored, they'll drop out eventually. So I ask
    for your help and attention.
        Finally, let me say that I'm very gratified by the broadbased
    support that this initiative seems to have attracted among the American
    people. I think it's because everybody knows that what you're doing is
    what we all need to do for the future. But I would ask you to remember
    this day, to talk to your friends and neighbors who you may never have
    mentioned this to, to find out whether all the people that work in their
    workplaces have access to these sort of training programs.
        But remember, what we're trying to do in this balanced budget now is
    we've closed the budget deficit, now we've got to close the skills

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    deficit. We cannot have the earnings gap in America, the income gap
    bigger because we didn't make the skills gap smaller. Now is the time to
    do it. We will never have a better time. And we will all--all--be richly
    rewarded when we have more stories like the ones I heard here from the
    alliance today.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:02 p.m. in the Atrium at the AT&T
    facility. In his remarks, he referred to employee Cheryl E. Simms, who
    introduced the President, Mirian M. Graddick, senior vice president of
    human resources, and Mary Jane McKeever, president, government markets,
    AT&T. The President also referred to the Communications Workers of
    America (CWA), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
    (IBEW), and the Alliance for Employee Growth and Development, Inc.