[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

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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

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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.