[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[August 3, 1999]
[Pages 1372-1375]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1372]]


Opening Remarks to the National Welfare to Work Forum in Chicago, 
Illinois
August 3, 1999

    Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm, 
wonderful welcome when I came in. Mr. Mayor, thank you for your friendship and your leadership. Chicago 
is a beautiful, beautiful city, and it works.
    I think I should simply begin by thanking the people of this city 
and this State for being so good to me and to Hillary and to Al and 
Tipper Gore and to our administration, and for setting an example of 
what we can do to make America work. I'm also kind of getting used to 
seeing all these pretty cows all over the place here. [Laughter] I was 
trying to think of what animals I could start putting all over the White 
House lawn when I get back, to follow the mayor's lead. [Laughter]
    I would like to say that Governor Ryan 
and Governor Thompson were here earlier. I 
thank them for coming by. I thank Governor Carper of Delaware for being here; Mayor Webb, Mayor Helmke, Mayor 
Morial, Mayor O'Neill. I thank Secretary Herman, our Secretary of Labor; Secretary of Transportation 
Slater; and Secretary Bill Daley, another native of this great city, for his work at 
Commerce; and Small Business Administrator Aida Alvarez.
    Secretary Shalala, our HHS Secretary, 
has been heavily involved in this. She's not here today, but I want to 
thank Olivia Golden and Al Collins for being here. And most of all, I want to thank the 
leaders of this remarkable business partnership, my good friend Eli 
Segal, who is the best startup person in the 
world.
    Many of you know this, but when I became President, I asked 
Eli to head our national service program, 
AmeriCorps. And we got it through the Congress, and in 4 years, 
AmeriCorps had 100,000 young people serving in our communities, earning 
money to go to school, a goal that took the Peace Corps 20 years to 
reach.
    So, I thought, ``Well, we need to get more employers involved in 
hiring people from welfare to work. I'll ask Eli 
to do it. Then I won't even have to think about it anymore.'' [Laughter] 
And so Eli got Gerry Greenwald and Paul 
Clayton, Robert Shapiro, Bill Esrey, and Jim 
Kelly, and they started, with five. And I 
said--then there were 5,000. And I said, ``But we need 10,000.'' And now 
there are 12,000. I think if I told them we needed 25,000, next year 
we'd have 30,000 employers here. And I thank him so much.
    And I want to thank Gerry especially 
for chairing our efforts. I understand he runs an airline company in his 
off hours--[laughter]--but I think most of the time, he's spent on this 
project in the last few years.
    Six and a half years ago I asked the American people to join me on a 
crusade to transform our system of welfare into a system of work; to 
transform a system of dependence into a system of independence; to prove 
that poor people could succeed, at the same time, at work and in raising 
their children; to bring a whole generation of Americans into the 
mainstream of our life.
    Now you see the signs of the transformation everywhere: Inner-city 
buses that used to be empty at rush hour are packed; tax preparation 
services are moving into abandoned storefronts, helping former welfare 
recipients fill out the first tax forms of their lives. There are more 
subtle changes: mothers collecting their mail with a little more pride 
because they know they'll see a bank statement, not a welfare check; 
children going to school with their heads held a little higher.
    It's difficult to remember that 7 years ago our country was largely 
out of work and out of ideas. Our economy was stagnant, burdened with a 
crushing debt and soaring deficits, high interest rates and high 
unemployment. But so was our political debate. For some, the welfare 
system was our last line of defense against abject poverty. To others, 
it was exhibit A of America's decline.
    Clearly, it had become a system that undermined our cherished values 
of work and family. When I was a Governor, a job I had for a dozen years 
before your were kind enough to give me this one, I had the chance to 
actually go to welfare offices, talk to caseworkers, talk to recipients, 
watch people check in. I spent hours, over a period of years, talking to 
welfare recipients, asking them, what would it take to make the system 
work for them, and listening

[[Page 1373]]

to them tell me all the manifold ways in which welfare discouraged work 
and independence.
    I asked the American people to change course, to restore with all of 
our people the fundamental bargain that we ought to have opportunity for 
all in return for responsibility from all our citizens, and to include 
everyone in America's community.
    Today, the bargain is being fulfilled, and our country is working 
again. We have the longest peacetime expansion in history, nearly 19 
million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in a generation, the lowest 
minority unemployment ever recorded, the highest homeownership in 
history. From a deficit of $290 billion, we are moving to a surplus of 
$99 billion, and this year alone we will pay $85 billion on our national 
debt.
    And a big part of this is the decision the American people, through 
their elected Representatives, made to end welfare as we know it. We 
raised the minimum wage and passed the earned-income tax credit, which 
says to working families, if you work full-time, you shouldn't have to 
raise your children in poverty. We gave 43 waivers to States to launch 
their own welfare reform efforts when I took office. And then in 1996, 
as has already been said, a big bipartisan majority, big majorities of 
both parties and both Houses reached across the divide to pass this 
welfare reform bill.
    We recognize that in addition to requiring able-bodied people to 
work within a certain period of time, millions of people who had never 
known anything but dependency, who had never even seen, many of them, 
their own parents have a job, could not make the transition on their own 
or easily. So we made sure there was extra support for child care, for 
transportation, for housing, and we kept the national guarantee, after 
two vetoes, but we kept the national guarantee of medical care and 
nutrition for the children of people on welfare and for those moving 
off.
    We also provided new tax incentives to encourage employers to hire 
people from welfare. Today I am very proud to be able to tell you that 
all 50 States and the District of Columbia have now met the work 
requirements for the percentage of people on welfare in their States 
that have to be in work that we set in 1996. Every single State is in 
compliance.
    The welfare rolls have been cut in half; they're at their lowest 
level in 32 years. And those who are on welfare today are 4 times as 
likely to work as when I took office. Now, while some of the credit, 
doubtless, goes to our booming economy, the Council of Economic Advisers 
recently did a study for me which found that welfare reform, with its 
new emphasis on work, has been the single most important factor in 
reducing the rolls. Three-quarters of the 6.8 million people who have 
left welfare since I took office did so after welfare reform was signed 
in 1996. And many who left before did so under the reform efforts 
adopted by the States.
    The credit goes to all of you in this audience and people like you 
across our country. When we passed the law in '96, I said moving 
Americans from welfare to work would take the commitment of every 
element of our society, not just Government but businesses, faith-based 
organizations, community groups, and private citizens. The Vice 
President has done a tremendous job of 
bringing our religious and service organizations together in his 
coalition to sustain success. And in 1997, as I said, my long-time 
friend Eli Segal agreed to help to rally the 
business community and you know the rest. Today, he, Gerry 
Greenwald, and the other founders have 
built a partnership that is 12,000 businesses strong.
    Members of this welfare to work partnership, businesses both large 
and small, have given--listen to this--just the members of this 
partnership have given 410,000 welfare recipients the opportunity to 
have a job. More than 8 in 10 executives report great success in hiring 
people off welfare rolls. They're finding these employees are a good 
investment. They work hard; they stay in their jobs as long or even 
longer than other employees. And in this era of labor shortages, we must 
not forget that welfare recipients can be a rich pool of untapped 
talent, people who are good for the bottom line. I thank you for 
recognizing the important role you can play in extending these 
opportunities to all Americans.
    I am proud to say, also under the Vice President's leadership, the Federal Government has done its part. Our 
goal was to hire 10,000 people by this year from welfare. We have now 
hired 14,000--in the smallest Federal Government since 1963.
    Mr. Mayor, one of the people we hired 
from welfare is here with us today. Her name is Maria 
Hernandez. She was on public assistance for 
more than 3 years; now she's worked as

[[Page 1374]]

an administrative assistant in our Cook County north census office since 
January. Thank you, Maria, and thank all the rest of you who are here 
who reflect the same story.
    Now, before we get on with the program today, I want to tell you 
that as pleased as we are, we have to do more. And I'd like to mention 
the things that I believe we have to do to make the most of this 
economic opportunity for America, to fulfill our moral obligation, to 
promote the values of work and family to the people still on public 
assistance and those who teeter going back and forth.
    First, we must continue to honor our commitment to welfare reform. 
There are some in Congress who want to cut the welfare block grants we 
give to the States and take some of that money back, because the welfare 
rolls are so low, to finance a big tax cut. I think that would be a 
mistake, and here's why; here's why: In every State, there are still 
people who could move from welfare to work if they had more training, if 
they had transportation, if they had child care. In every State, there 
are people who may be working today who might have to leave the work 
force, for lack of transportation or child care. In every State, there 
are people who can stay on the job if they get further training.
    So I say, let's spend this money to develop the human capacity of 
our people. It will make the economy stronger, and we will all be better 
off.
    There are other things which need to be done. I have asked the 
Congress to build on the welfare-to-work program, by helping those who 
are least prepared to work. My welfare-to-work budget this year contains 
extra funds for adult literacy and for education and training for 
adults. I think that's important.
    We must also do more to help low-income fathers honor their 
responsibility to pay child support to their children. Three years ago 
we strengthened our child support enforcement laws. This welfare-to-work 
budget targets funds to help responsible fathers work and pay child 
support. I hope Congress will pass it.
    Let me say, we also need to make sure that when people move from 
welfare to work, they understand, if they're in low-income jobs, that 
their kids are still entitled to Medicaid coverage if their employer 
doesn't offer health care, and to food stamps, so they'll have adequate 
nutrition.
    The only piece of troubling news in this whole happy scenario is 
that there has been a drop in use of food stamps among low-income people 
that is greater than the number of people who have moved into jobs with 
incomes above that level. No one can find the answer for me, and we've 
been looking now for weeks and weeks and weeks. But I think, clearly, 
what has happened is, a lot of people moved from welfare to work; 
they're delighted to be at work; and they literally don't know that 
they're still eligible for this assistance. That's what I think is going 
on. So we have to work on that, and a lot of you here can help.
    We also have to strengthen our commitment to child care. For years, 
mothers on welfare chose not to work because to do so would literally 
have hurt their children, because it would have cost them more in child 
care than they could make on the job. In 1996 we added $4 billion to our 
child care subsidy, but believe it or not, we have only met one-tenth of 
the need. So I ask Congress to pass our child care initiative, to 
provide more child care subsidies and tax credits to needy families and 
new funds to improve the quality of care. This will also help to sustain 
welfare reform.
    To finish the job, I've asked Congress to double our commitment to 
transportation assistance to provide 25,000 new welfare-to-work housing 
vouchers so people can live near their jobs. To finish the job, I have 
asked Congress to increase the minimum wage, to make sure, when people 
work, they are living above the poverty line. And to finish the job, we 
have to recognize that there are whole communities--big inner-city 
neighborhoods, places in Appalachia, places in the Mississippi Delta, 
small towns where the only factory has moved away, Native American 
reservations--where the light of prosperity has not shined on the whole 
community.
    Last month I traveled across America to shine that spotlight on the 
inner cities, on the Mississippi Delta, on Appalachia, on the Native 
American communities. I saw families doing their best to raise children 
in neighborhoods where unemployment and poverty were more than double 
the national average. On some of our Indian reservations it is above 70 
percent.
    I ask your help in passing my new markets initiative, because it 
will give American investors the same incentives to invest in poor 
neighborhoods in America we give them today to invest

[[Page 1375]]

in poor countries around the world. I think it is a very, very good 
idea.
    And finally, I ask you to continue your work. We all know that the 
people who still are on welfare, by and large, are the most difficult to 
place in work. We all know that they are the most likely to have 
children with special needs, or limited levels of education and skills, 
or to be a long way from an available workplace with no transportation 
funds. We know there are problems out there, but we also know that there 
are good people who wish to go to work and ought to have the chance. And 
so I ask you to stay at this and to recruit some of your vendors and 
clients, to reach out to small business people you know, to ask others 
to join this crusade.
    I want to say a special word of thanks to IBM for sponsoring a new 
on-line network that can help match businesses who need workers with 
welfare recipients who need jobs. And for out part, I want you to know 
I'm working to extend the welfare-to-work tax credit and the work 
opportunity tax credit to reward those of you who take the chance on 
giving more Americans a chance.
    The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once said that, ``work is the 
true source of human welfare.'' In this era of unprecedented prosperity, 
we still have some work of our own to do to make sure the we embrace all 
Americans in this prosperity and to give every American the chance to 
succeed at work and to succeed at home.
    I thank every one of you for what you have done, and I ask you to 
support the initiatives I outlined with the Congress and to stay at the 
job until we can literally say we have completely ended welfare as we 
know it, and America is a better place because our families are 
stronger, our children are growing up in more stable homes, and every 
adult American who is willing to work has a chance to do so.
    Thank you very, very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:10 a.m. at the Navy Pier Festival Hall. 
In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago; Gov. 
George H. Ryan of Illinois; Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin; Gov. 
Thomas R. Carper of Delaware; Mayor Wellington E. Webb of Denver, CO; 
Mayor Paul Helmke of Fort Wayne, IN; Mayor Marc H. Morial of New 
Orleans, LA; Mayor Beverly O'Neill of Long Beach, CA; Assistant 
Secretary of Health and Human Services Olivia A. Golden, Administration 
for Children and Families; Alvin C. Collins, Director, Office of Family 
Assistance, Administration for Children and Families; Eli Segal, 
president and chief executive officer, Welfare to Work Partnership; 
Gerald Greenwald, chairman and chief executive officer, United Airlines 
Corp.; Paul Clayton, president, Burger King North America; Robert B. 
Shapiro, chairman, president, and chief executive officer, Monsanto Co.; 
William T. Esrey, chairman and chief executive officer, Sprint Corp.; 
and James P. Kelly, chairman and chief executive officer, United Parcel 
Service.