[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 6, 2000]
[Pages 640-643]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks to Corporate Leaders on the One America Initiative
April 6, 2000
Thank you. Let me begin by welcoming all of you here and thanking
our previous speakers. I thank Ben Johnson for making sure I won't be alone to turn the lights out
at the end of my tenure here--[laughter]--and for what you can see is
his evident passion for his work. I don't know if I've ever heard
anybody tell a centipede joke before. [Laughter] I grew up in a place
when I was a kid where I could collect centipedes, scorpions, brown
recluse spiders, all kinds of snakes. I never thought they were very
funny before. [Laughter] But he made
it funny.
I want to thank George Fisher for his
leadership on this and so many other issues. I have really loved working
with him over the course of my Presidency. And I want to thank Duane
Ackerman for what he said. We didn't know
each other very well until I started on this whole new markets tour,
which is an important part of building one America, giving everybody a
chance to participate in our prosperity. And I realized that he had
come, like me, from pretty modest circumstances to a very high position,
and he never forgot where he came from. And he's interested in giving
all people a chance to be a part of it, and I am grateful.
I was looking at these two leaders of our business community and
looking at many of you out here with whom I had the privilege to work,
and it made me feel very proud of my country and very confident of our
future success.
I'd like to thank the members of the administration who are here:
Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman; our FCC
Chair, Bill Kennard; and the front row
here has a whole lineup of our White House stars. I thank them for all
being here and for their commitment to this work.
As Ben said, this is the third time we have brought key leaders to
the White House to talk about the role of specific elements in American
society for building one America. Last year we had a distinguished group
of lawyers here who answered our call to use the power of the legal
profession not only to fight discrimination and empower citizens who
want to do the same but to have their law firms reflect the legal causes
that lawyers have been fighting for, for decades in this country, and I
appreciated that. Last month we had a coalition of religious leaders
here who pledged the power of faith in our ongoing efforts. Today we
recognize that corporate America is an equally, perhaps even more
[[Page 641]]
powerful force in the movement for building one America.
Dr. King once said, ``We refuse to believe there are insufficient
funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this Nation.'' Today, there
is a new understanding that actually building one America replenishes
the funds in the vaults of opportunity, that this is not an act of
charity or kindness or even constitutional obligation but enlightened
self-interest.
For the past 7 years, I have tried to unlock those vaults and let
the river of opportunity flow to every community and every person. And I
am grateful for the chance that we have had to be part of building the
longest economic expansion in our history and the lowest African-
American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded. I'm proud of the
fact that we have an administration that looks like America, with the
most diverse Cabinet and staff in history.
But we all know there are still people and places left behind, and
there are still places where problems exist even when people try to root
them out. And I appreciated George Fisher
citing his own company. I am quite sure that any of us, including me,
who had any organization of any size have similar experiences somewhere
in the operations which we lead.
Now, a part of what we're trying to do is just to get economic
opportunity out there. That's what the whole new markets effort is
about. We've been to the Mississippi Delta, to Appalachia, to the Pine
Ridge Reservation, to inner cities. On April the 16th, I'm going to go
out to East Palo Alto, to the Shiprock Native American Reservation in
New Mexico, and to one or two other places to try to focus specifically
on what technology can do, not to open but to close the digital divide
and increase economic opportunity for our people.
But it is also important to put the power of diversity to work for
our economy in daily ways. And that means encouraging diversity
throughout every single corporate organization in America, from the
boardroom to the stockroom, forging partnerships between corporations
and others who need them, schools and communities, to promote
educational opportunities. It means working with efforts like the
Welfare to Work Partnership, the School to Work Partnership, to get more
young people on the path to good careers. It means doing more business
with small, minority-owned suppliers of all kinds. It means using the
corporate bully pulpit to convince others that an investment in
diversity is the right and the smart thing to do.
Yesterday we had a fascinating economic summit here at the White
House. It highlighted how the rapid development of information
technology in the last years--10 years--has dramatically transformed our
economy, giving us unprecedented growth, wealth, and job creation.
We also faced the fact that a lot of people have been left behind in
this development. We know that minorities and poor whites have
participated at a lower rate in the new economy because they don't have
the skills necessary to fill a large number of the high-tech jobs being
created every day.
Even though we have a very low unemployment rate, the lowest in 30
years, it's very interesting--to highlight this--where the shortage of
high-tech jobs is. The Congress, once again, is debating the need to
raise the ceiling on what we call the H-1B visas. Those are visas that
people get because they have special skills to come to contribute here.
And we will raise it, and we should raise it, because first of all
immigration is good for our country, and secondly, these companies need
to continue to grow.
But it is very interesting that in the largest center of pure
information technology employment, Silicon Valley, right next to it you
have East Palo Alto, where I'm going, which has a 20 percent poverty
rate and a high unemployment rate. Now, if you believe as I do, that
intelligence is evenly distributed throughout the human race, that means
some of those people could fill some of those H-1B slots if only they
had had the education and training to do it.
The second-largest concentration of high-tech information technology
jobs, interestingly enough, is not in New York or on Corridor 128 in
Massachusetts, it's here in the Washington, DC, area. The city of
Washington, even though the unemployment rate is now--I think we've got
it down below 6 percent--is still the second or third highest in the
country compared to all the other States. And there's a huge job
shortage here.
And if you believe that intelligence is evenly distributed and a lot
of these people could be filling those jobs, if more people had had
attitudes like those we've had here expressed and more systems in place
like those that many of the corporate leaders here have put in place,
and they could fill some of those H-1B jobs.
[[Page 642]]
Now, the trick is to do both at the same time, and that is what we're
committed to doing. But I think it's worth pointing out.
According to our Office of Science and Technology Policy, African-
Americans and Hispanics are less than half as likely, still today, to
earn degrees in science and engineering as whites. According to a
February issue of Black Enterprise magazine, only 4 of the top 50 blacks
in corporate America work in the high-tech industry.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate that information technology
will need 3 million more workers by the year 2008. So, this is just one
example of something we need to be doing. And I might say this: This is
not just these dot-com companies; information technology is dominating,
driving, and making more efficient all kinds of traditional
corporations. In that sense, they're just as important as they are to
Duane Ackerman's connecting people. They
also will create more Kodak moments for George in the years ahead. [Laughter]
I'm glad you mentioned that Kodak moment, by the way. I've often
thought I should be getting some sort of stock benefit--[laughter]--for
all the film I use here.
Let me just say, I want to make a couple of announcements today, to
put some teeth into this enormously important event. First of all, 25
companies, all of them represented here today, have pledged to commit at
least $1 million a year for the next 10 years to expand diversity in the
high-tech work force. That's a $250 million long-term commitment by
American corporations to close the technology skills gap.
A classic example of doing well by doing good will help us to create
one America. The funds being pledged today include contributions to
strengthen math and science education; to provide scholarships for
minorities and women; to train more math and science teachers in our
inner cities, a very important thing; to help young people pursue
careers in science, engineering, and information technology. This is a
very important proposition.
Many other things can be done. And I hope that this meeting today
will just be the beginning of a whole new burst of effort by corporate
America. And I want to thank George Fisher for saying that you don't want to judge your performance
by just whether the numbers look good or whether you've met the minimum
or whether you can't be sued in a court of law. That's not what all this
is about. This is not about keeping something bad from happening. This
is about making good things happen. And the more I represent you around
the world, the more I realize that this effort to build one America is,
in a way, the most advanced example of a struggle going on all over the
world, which has gone on throughout human history.
I was in this little village in India a couple weeks ago, and I met
with this women's dairy co-op. And they showed me how they had some, for
them, very high technology to test the fat content of their milk and how
proud they were that even in this poor village they had--everything that
they did, all their transactions were conducted by computer.
And then I saw, in this little poor village, that the State
government there had put a computer up in whatever language the people
who would come to it spoke, so that even the poorest village people
could get the information they needed that the Government had. And one
woman who had just had a baby came in, pulled up the Health Department's
page, and found out what she was supposed to do the first 2 months of
her baby's life, and then printed it right out. And she went home with
information as good as you could get if you had walked out of a doctor's
office in Chevy Chase here today. That is the kind of thing we ought to
be doing.
But the point I want to make is, what they told me was, all these
changes started in 1993 when the Government adopted a new law that said
the local governments had to reflect all the tribes and all the castes
of India and that women had to be given 30 percent of the positions in
local government. And they told me, these people in this poor village--
you'd think, well, they'd think, ``Gosh, you know, we're so poor we've
got to work together.'' They told me that until this law passed and they
all got elected, that people had never had dinner together in this tiny
village across the caste lines and the tribal lines. And now that
they've been doing it, you know, they know what they were missing, and
they can't imagine why they didn't do it all along.
You see these things happen; you all know all the terrible stories
from Bosnia to Rwanda, to the continuing strife we have in the Middle
East and the struggles we're having in Kosovo. But what I want you to
understand is, there's
[[Page 643]]
something endemic in the human condition that both makes us afraid of
people who are different from us and beneath that makes us long to reach
out and connect with them.
And I think it's important to point out that this whole effort of
building one America is not about homogenizing us. Four or 5 years from
now, they will be having events like this at the White House, and--
certainly within 10 years--it will be impossible to have four speakers
and they will all be middle-aged gray-haired guys and three of them will
be white. It won't happen. It will change. In my lifetime, I think we
will have a woman President and certainly an African-American or
Hispanic or an Asian-American President--maybe all three.
But the point is, it won't diminish white guys. It will make life
more interesting. [Laughter] But the struggle is to understand it that
way. This is not a matter of homogenizing this country; it's a matter of
celebrating, relishing our differences and somehow finding a way to
affirm our common humanity. And the older I get, the more I become
convinced that it may be one of the two or three most important journeys
in life for all of us--not just as an organization, just individual
journeys--figuring out how to understand and respect the differences
between people and not feel that in order for you to matter more,
someone else has to matter less; in order for you to be secure, someone
else has to be insecure; in order for you to win, someone else has to
lose.
It is a constant theme throughout all human history, and it is
something that, in positive and profoundly negative ways, is being
played out all over the world today. And I am grateful that in our
country, we are largely dealing with--in spite of the tragedy of the
hate crimes against people because of their race or their religion or
because they are gay, which we have to try to stamp out--largely, we're
playing this out in positive ways today.
But I would ask you to remember as we close--just one last thing--
what George said. This is not a matter of getting everybody right with
the law. It's not a matter of having the right statistics. It's a matter
of making the businesses of America a joy to work in, because they will
be more productive, they will be more profitable. People are happy to go
to work because they are proud of who they are; they respect those who
are different from them; and they are making progress on this very
difficult journey of life. Now I think it is a great, great endeavor in
which to be involved, and I thank you so much for your support.
Thank you.
Note: The President spoke at 3:43 p.m. in Presidential Hall in the
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he
referred to George M. C. Fisher, chairman, Eastman Kodak Co.; and F.
Duane Ackerman, chief executive officer, BellSouth.