    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 7, 1999]
    [Pages 1716-1720]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1716]]

    Remarks at a National Labor Research Association Dinner in New York City
    October 7, 1999

        Thank you for that nice, restrained welcome. [Laughter] It is
    wonderful to be here with all of you and to see your enthusiasm. And I
    thank you for it. I want to thank all of you for being here and for the
    purpose that you're here. Brian McLaughlin
    and Lee Saunders and Representative Loretta
    Sanchez is here. Basil Patterson, I was delighted to see him. Randi
    Weingarten and so many old friends of mine
    are here. I want to say a special word of congratulations to Jim
    Hoffa and Ed Ott on their
    awards.
        Thank you for making New York the biggest, strongest union city in
    America. I also want to thank Greg Tarpinian
    and the Labor Research Association. You know, when people hear the words
    ``think tank,'' they don't think about dinners where people behave the
    way you are right now. [Laughter] They think about really buttondown
    types, chewing on their pipe stems, musing about the higher things.
    Well, you're not in an ivory tower, and it's important that people with
    feet on the ground do the thinking in America. And I thank you for doing
    it.
        I would just say one other thing about this dinner tonight, and your
    work and deciding to honor Jim and Ed. They represent the vitality and the strength and the
    intensity and the compassion and the direction of the modern labor
    movement in America. One of the things that I wanted to do when the Vice
    President and I came into office is to change the way America thought
    about labor. I was so sick and tired of more than a decade of people
    trying to make unions the whipping boy of whatever it was that was wrong
    with America they wanted to make right.
        And when I asked--I never will forget this--when I sat around and
    talked to Hillary and my other close
    friends, and I was trying to decide--[applause]--well, that's good, too.
    We need that response in New York especially, I think. [Laughter]
        But we were trying to decide, you know, what we ought to do with
    this whole Vice Presidential thing. And I said, ``Look, I think I'm
    going with Gore, because he's the same age
    I am''--he's actually younger, as he never tires of telling people--
    [laughter]--``and we're from the same part of the country, and we're
    from the same sort of general wing of the Democratic Party.'' But I
    think that's good, because what I want to do is change the way America
    thinks about politics.
        Because everybody in Washington had created an environment,
    particularly the previous two administrations, where you couldn't be
    pro-business if you were pro-labor. You couldn't be pro-economic growth
    if you thought we ought to try to preserve the environment. You couldn't
    be for doing something about the deficit if you wanted to invest in our
    children's education. And it was this kind of nutty world that didn't
    exist anywhere I knew in America except in Washington and in the
    political choices we were given.
        And so we made this argument to the American people. We said,
    ``Look, give us a chance to prove you can be pro-business and pro-labor.
    Give us a chance to prove you can be for protecting the environment and
    growing the economy. Give us a chance to get rid of this deficit and
    invest more in the education of our children and the future of our
    country.''
        And it was just an argument--just an argument. But the people of
    this great city and this wonderful State and our great country gave us a
    chance. And every step of the way, you were with us. And now, after 6\1/
    2\ years, thanks to you, those who produce ideas and those who do the
    work, it is not an argument anymore. The evidence is in, and we were
    right.
        Thanks to you, we raised the minimum wage; we got family and medical
    leave on the books; we cut taxes for millions of low income working
    families by doubling the earned-income tax credit. And whenever our
    friends on the other side of the aisle in Congress try to roll back the
    rights of workers, we turn them back. And every time we did that, every
    time we did it, they said we were hurting the job climate in America.
    ``If you raise the minimum wage, you'll hurt small business. If you pass
    family and medical leave''--after the previous administration vetoed
    it--``you'll hurt business. We won't have job growth. If you don't get
    rid of the Davis-Bacon law, you're going to hurt the business

    [[Page 1717]]

    climate. If you double the earned-income tax credit that goes to people
    who are working their hearts out, with kids and barely above the poverty
    line, you know you'll waste a lot of tax money on people who will take
    advantage of it, weaken the economy--be hard to balance the budget.''
        I heard all those arguments over and over again. Well, the evidence
    is in. We didn't get a single vote from the other side for our economic
    plan in 1993 that the labor movement stood with us on. And we stayed
    strong for all these other things because we believed you could be pro-
    labor and pro-business; we believed you could be pro-family and pro-
    work. And after 6\1/2\ years, thanks to you and all those who stood
    together, we have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest
    welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the
    first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years, the highest
    homeownership in history, 19\1/2\ million new jobs, and the longest
    economic expansion in peacetime in the history of the United States of
    America.
        Now, the question is, what are we going to do now? There will be a
    great debate across this country over the next year, between now and the
    next election for President, for the Senate, for the Congress, and
    people will say, because they know we Americans all like to hear it,
    ``Well, we ought to have a change.'' And guess what? I agree with that.
    I agree with that. If there were any candidate for President on the
    horizon today who said, ``Vote for me, and I'll do exactly what Bill
    Clinton did,'' I'd vote against that person. [Laughter] I would vote
    against that person, because the world is changing too fast.
        We've worked hard to turn this country around and get it going in
    the right direction. And I believe that the changes we ought to be
    focused on are those which, now, we have the luxury of embracing, to
    just totally rewrite the future for the United States and much of the
    rest of the world for our children and our children's children.
        Yes, we ought to change. But what we ought to do is build on what
    we've done to reach for the stars, not take a U-turn and get us back in
    the same trouble we were in 1992, when we got here. And so I say to you,
    now that--in the presence of a think tank--we need the best ideas to
    reach for the stars.
        The number of people over 65 in America is going to double in the
    next 30 years. I sure hope I live to be one of them. [Laughter] And
    there will be two people working for every one person drawing Social
    Security. Social Security Trust Fund's supposed to run out of money in
    2034. We have the money now. We ought to save Social Security for the
    baby boom generation, for their children, and their grandchildren.
        The average 65-year-old American today has a life expectancy of 82.
    Those of you who are young enough to still be having children, when we
    get the human genome project finished, it will be normal for young
    mothers to come home from the hospital with their children, with a
    roadmap of their children's biological future, in ways that will maybe
    raise their life expectancy into the high eighties or the nineties,
    maybe even to 100 years. Things that are unthinkable.
        But today, over three-quarters of the elderly people in this country
    do not have the prescription drug coverage they need. So I say we ought
    to modernize Medicare, lengthen the life of it so it can take on the
    baby boomers, but give those people a chance to have affordable
    prescription drugs, as we should have done long ago.
        We ought to raise the minimum wage again. You can't raise a family
    on $10,700 a year. Hallelujah, the House of Representatives, on a
    bipartisan vote, passed the Patient's Bill of Rights today, but we ought
    to make it the law of the land, and we're a long way away. We need your
    help on that.
        We ought to bring economic opportunity to all the people in places
    that haven't reached it yet. You know as well as I do, there are
    neighborhoods in this city and communities in this State that have not
    participated in our prosperity. From the time I started the empowerment
    zone program, that the Vice President has
    led so ably, in 1993, to the proposal I made for new markets; from the
    small towns to the inner-city areas, to the Appalachians to the
    Mississippi Delta to the Indian reservations of this country, I believe
    we ought to give people with money in this country the same incentives
    to invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in poor areas
    in Latin America, and the Caribbean and Africa, in Asia.
        I think we ought to bridge the so-called digital divide. Our
    administration's worked very hard to make sure we get all the classrooms

    [[Page 1718]]

    in this country hooked up to the Internet and they can all afford to do
    it by the year 2000. But think of this: I was out in California last
    week, and I met with some people that work for eBay. Did you ever buy
    anything off eBay? I bet there are people right here who have done that.
        Twenty thousand Americans, including people who used to be on
    welfare, are now making a living trading on that company. But there are
    still a lot of people that wouldn't know one end of a computer from
    another. Think about what it would be like if, for every American
    family, access to the Internet were as universal as access to the
    telephone. I don't want to see a digital divide for our kids in this
    country. I want every single child to have access to that high-tech
    future.
        I think--I'll give you another example. The crime rate is at a 26-
    year low. In every big city in America, it's way down. And everybody
    involved deserves a lot of credit, including the Congress who voted for
    the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban, the 100,000 police, more help
    for the cities to prevent crime. But it's not low enough. Does anybody
    really think America is safe enough?
        The crime rate is at a 26-year low. That's the good news. The bad
    news, I can't get one person out there to stand up and say, ``I'm
    satisfied with the safety level in America.'' If we're the biggest and
    most powerful economy in the world, if we're the freest country in the
    world, if we have the most vibrant democracy--we now know something we
    didn't know in 1992; people didn't have any idea we could turn the crime
    rate around in '92. We know we can now. So why don't we set a real goal
    worthy of America? Why don't we make up our mind we're going to make
    this the safest big country in the world--that is a worthy goal--and
    come up with the resources and the plans necessary to do it?
        The last thing I want to say is this. I think that the Congress
    ought to take one major part of my budget, which is to save enough money
    to pay the debt down so that in 15 years, for the first time since 1835
    when Andrew Jackson was President, America can be out of debt.
        And let me tell you why I think every union member ought to be for
    that. You know, when I studied economics in college, every professor I
    had said that this debt's a good thing. Every country needs a certain
    amount of debt. And it was good when we were borrowing money to build
    interstate highways; we were borrowing money to build airports; we were
    borrowing money to build America. But for the last 30 years we've been
    borrowing money to go to McDonald's at night or come to dinner here or
    whatever else the Government does. We're borrowing money just to get
    along through the day.
        Meanwhile, interest rates are set in a global economy. And nobody
    can keep their money if somebody else will pay a higher price for it.
    You've seen that happen in country after country. That's what happened
    in Asia a couple of years ago.
        But if we got the Government out of the borrowing business, it means
    that everybody that all of you work for could borrow money for less. It
    means there would be more businesses, more expansion, more jobs, higher
    incomes. It means that all the families in this room tonight would have
    lower interest rates for college loans, for home loans, for car loans,
    for credit card payments. It means we would be more immune to future
    problems around the world. And we ought to do it for our children's
    sake. We ought to do that.
        Now, one thing I want to say in closing. You said the NAFTA thing;
    I'll tell you one thing I've done that the Teamsters agree with. I don't
    intend to allow the trucking rules to be changed until there's safety
    there that we can know about. That is--the big problem I have with trade
    is not the problem some of you have. The problem I have is that it's too
    hard to enforce the rules. This is a rule we still have control of, and
    we now have evidence that two-thirds of the trucks that come across the
    border are not safe. They don't meet our standards. And I intend to see
    that the rules are followed before I follow the rules on this. I think
    that's important.
        I want to say something about trade. Generally, the American labor
    movement has supported trade with countries that are in our income
    groups and worried about trade when we're trading with countries that
    are poorer than we are because they pay lower labor costs. But it
    bothers me that we have 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent
    of the world's income, and we're facing rising protectionism from people
    unwilling to buy our products around the world. We see it in Europe. We
    see it elsewhere.

    [[Page 1719]]

        So what I think we need to do is to come together, as I did when
    John Sweeney went with me to Switzerland the
    other day, to the International Labor Organization to call for a ban
    everywhere in the world on child labor. I think what we need to do, I
    think we need a policy, a progressive policy, on putting a human face on
    globalization so we don't leave people behind, so we have rising labor
    standards, rising standards of living, rising environmental standards as
    a part of expanding trade.
        If that happens, nobody will be the loser, and you can look at trade
    everywhere the way generally the labor movement looks at trade with
    Canada and Europe today. I think that we can't run away from the global
    economy, but we can sure put a more human face on it. And we ought to
    take the lead in shaping it, instead of being passive and being shaped
    by it.
        And one final point I want to make. I am grateful to the American
    labor movement, in some ways more than anything else, for standing
    through--for decades and decades and decades for the cause of civil
    rights and human rights at home and around the world.
        We had a memorial service for Lane Kirkland the other day at our
    common alma mater; Lane and I both graduated from the school of foreign
    service at Georgetown. And Lech Walesa, the
    former President of Poland, came all the way from Poland to speak at his
    friend's memorial service, because Lane Kirkland and the American labor
    movement stood for the freedom of the Polish dock workers and the Polish
    citizens in throwing off the shackles of communism. And I have seen it
    here at home, where the American labor movement has always been in the
    forefront against discrimination.
        And I just want to leave you with this thought. It's really
    interesting--I see more and more people in all kinds of work working
    with computers. Most of you, if you're like me, have got kids that know
    a lot more about computers than you do. We're all sort of entranced by
    what's happening in the modern world. I was talking to some people about
    the library I hope to build when I leave office, and they said, ``Well,
    Mr. President, you need to get some virtual reality in your library.''
    [Laughter] And I said, I thought that was what Washington, DC, was all
    about. [Laughter]
        So I said--so, you know, I'm sort of technologically challenged.
    They make fun of me at the White House. I said, ``Now, tell me what you
    mean by that.'' And they said, ``Well, what we mean is, if you have
    virtual reality in your library, then instead of showing people a movie
    about something like the Middle East peace signing between Arafat and
    Rabin, people will walk into a room and everything will get dark, and
    they'll feel like they're there, and a part of it.'' That sounded pretty
    impressive to me.
        So anyway, we're going to live in this world where we're just
    enthralled by all these advances. Don't you think it's interesting that
    in a world that will be dominated--historians will say, with the most
    strange of all times, we had unparalleled prosperity, unparalleled
    technological advances, and yet what bedeviled us the most, from
    Northern Ireland to the Middle East, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to the tribal
    wars of Africa? What bedeviled us the most from James Byrd being torn
    apart in Texas to Matthew Shepard being laid out on a rack in Wyoming to
    these kids being shot at at the Jewish community center and that poor
    Filipino postalworker being murdered to the people in the Middle West:
    the basketball coach at Northwestern and the Korean guy coming out of
    church? What bedeviled us most, at home and abroad, in the modern world?
    The most primitive failing of human beings: We're afraid of people who
    are different from us.
        It's easy to go from fear to hatred. Once you get to hating people,
    it's easy to dehumanize them. And before you know it, you're killing
    them. And I think you ought to think about that.
        One of the things that is really important about the American labor
    movement is that you never wanted to go forward in the future leaving
    anybody behind. You never wanted to look down your nose at somebody
    because they were different. And you never wanted to forget about your
    neighbors around the world who were denied the right to organize, the
    right to vote, the right to speak, the right to live free.
        So I ask you, as we look toward the future, don't forget your old
    mission. Because if we could all get along and treat each other as human
    beings, we'd be a lot better off.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:43 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the New
    York Hilton. In his remarks, he referred to Brian McLaughlin, New York
    City Central Labor Council president, Ed

    [[Page 1720]]

    Ott, New York City Central Labor Council director of politics, and John
    J. Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO; Lee Saunders, district council 37
    trustee, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees;
    Basil Patterson, partner, Meyer, Suozzi, English, and Klein; Randi
    Weingarten, president, United Federation of Teachers; James P. Hoffa,
    general president, International Brotherhood of Teamsters; and Greg
    Tarpinian, executive director, Labor Research Association.