[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 50 (Monday, December 20, 1993)]
[Pages 2584-2587]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Presenting the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards

 December 14, 1993

    Thank you very much. Secretary Brown and former Secretaries of 
Commerce, Members of Congress, members of the Baldrige family, and the 
honorees and all their supporters waving the flags and the signs in the 
back. It's kind of nice, after all of the speeches I've given and all 
the crowds I have to see, those kinds of signs waved at me when I speak.
    Before I present the Baldrige Award today I would like to talk just 
a moment about the progress of the GATT negotiations which Secretary 
Brown mentioned. Today the United States negotiators have achieved a 
breakthrough in the talks to conclude a new round in the General 
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. We are now on the verge of an historic 
victory in our efforts to open foreign markets to American products.
    I do want to make it clear, however, that the negotiations are not 
concluded yet. Thorny issues remained, and I have instructed our 
negotiators to push very hard for our objectives as they conclude the 
remaining details. I've made it clear that I will not accept a bad GATT 
but that we will not spare any effort to fight for a good one. Now the 
United States and the European Community are in a position to work 
shoulder to shoulder to push for concessions from other nations in the 
final hours.
    The stakes are immense. This would be the single largest trade 
agreement ever. It writes new rules of the road for world trade well 
into the next century. It would cut other countries' tariffs for our 
goods, on average, by more than one-third. When fully phased in, it 
could add as much as $100 billion to $200 billion to the United States 
economy every year. It opens foreign markets to our manufacturing and 
agricultural products and for the first time covers services. It does 
all of this while preserving our sovereignty and especially our ability 
to retaliate against unfair foreign trade practices.
    With NAFTA, our Nation chose to take the new world economy head on, 
to compete and win and not retreat. Our willingness to lead set the pace 
for other nations of the world. Americans have reason to be proud; we're 
on the way to making this world change in a way that works for us. I 
know that all of you join me in wishing our negotiators well and hoping 
that we can conclude a successful agreement. We have another day.
    I'm delighted to be here in this wonderful auditorium again, the 
same place where we signed the historic NAFTA legislation just a few 
days ago. A lot of people thought that that fight would end up in 
defeat. But I felt

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if we stuck by it, if we just kept arguing that a wealthy country can 
only create jobs and raise incomes by increasing the number of its 
customers for goods and services, in the end we would prevail. And we 
did, thanks in large measure to an enormous bipartisan coalition of 
people from all over America and to the efforts of Secretary Ron Brown 
who worked very hard on it as well as Mickey Kantor and so many others. 
I'm honored to be with you again for this happy occasion because, like 
NAFTA, the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award is an important part of our 
effort to change the way America thinks about doing its business.
    In the months since I have been in office, we've been taking all the 
specific actions we can to try to help our Nation adapt to the changing 
world we find, working to create a climate in which private enterprise 
can grow and prosper and put Americans back to work. From the deficit 
reduction program to NAFTA to addressing the credit crunch to the 
deregulation of high-tech exports to the successful meetings with the G-
7 nations and the Asian-Pacific nations, the goal is the same: to make 
our people more secure in the shifting economic environment at home and 
abroad by allowing us to compete and to win.
    With the reduction in the deficit and the other actions, we see 
inflation down, interest rates down, job creation up, personal income 
up. We see things moving in the right direction. Consumer confidence 
rose 18 percent in November. We've had 7 months of increased retail 
sales. Last month, people who were delinquent in their home mortgages 
were at their lowest level in 19 years. Over 5 million Americans have 
refinanced their homes. Millions of others have refinanced other debt. 
Manufacturing is expanding.
    We are trying, in other words, to take care of our business in the 
Government so you can take care of your business: increasing 
productivity, creating jobs and incomes for the American people. When 
both of us do our part, the Government and the private sector, we're on 
our way to long-lasting economic growth.
    Six years ago, the United States Government, in a previous 
administration, exercised the wisdom of establishing the Baldrige Award. 
In no time, because of the astounding success of its winners in taking 
care of their business, the award became a symbol of excellence and an 
inspiration for the rebirth of American competitiveness. For that, we 
owe a good deal to the legacy of the award's namesake. Until his 
untimely and tragic death in 1987, Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige 
was a voice in urging Americans to focus on quality. His cause lives on 
through this award named for him. And we are honored very much to have 
his family here with us today.
    The idea of quality took hold as American companies become more and 
more aware of the intense and growing competition from overseas and more 
and more clear in this country of ours, we could never hope to compete 
in America by lowering our cost of doing business, and particularly our 
labor costs, to the level of the poorest nations of the world. The 
challenge is clear: How do we learn from our competitors? How do we meet 
them head on? How do we learn from each other in every workplace in 
America? All these success stories have a common theme: Companies that 
listen to the needs of their customers and the ideas of their workers, 
companies that streamline their operations and adopt the idea of 
continuous improvement in products and services. It's management from 
the top down and from the bottom up, better known now as quality 
management.
    Through the Baldrige Award and the principles of quality management 
it embraces, countless businesses have found new and stronger life. 
Beyond manufacturing, these principles are now beginning to be applied 
in fields like health care, education, and yes, believe it or not, even 
Government. By giving both employees and customers a say in how 
businesses are run, these businesses have built pride and productivity 
while improving management and product and services. Quality management 
is clearly a win-win formula. It helps businesses to do well, it beefs 
up our competitiveness around the world, and it helps to create jobs and 
to stabilize and increase incomes for our working people. This year's 
winners are outstanding examples of that.
    I got my schooling in total quality management and what it can do 
when I was the Gov- 

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ernor of my home State of Arkansas. That's when I got to know the people 
at Eastman Chemical Company. On several occasions I visited their plant 
in Batesville, Arkansas, and I used to tell a story on the campaign 
trail at home, walking into a room, seeing a guy--this plant is sort of 
out in the country--and seeing a guy working a computer wearing cowboy 
boots and one of those big rodeo championship belt buckles. If you're 
not from the rodeo country, you've never seen one, but if you've never 
seen one, the first time you see one, it looks like a silver dish you 
might give as a wedding present to someone. [Laughter] Anyway, I walked 
into this room, and this guy had his jeans and his boots on and his big 
rodeo belt buckle on, listening to country music, working a computer. 
And he launched into a much more eloquent speech than I had ever given 
about the importance of raising the skills of American workers so we 
could provide for our families and our children and their future.
    I also traveled to the headquarters of Eastman Chemical in 
Kingsport, Tennessee, for a closeup look at the progress they were 
making there. They were always a big help to me in implementing what I 
was trying to do at home. Indeed, Eastman Chemical loaned me one of 
their executives, Asa Whitaker, who worked to set up the Arkansas 
quality management program, which was the first State governmentwide 
program of its kind in the entire United States of America. Today that 
company is justifiably the large manufacturing winner of the Malcolm 
Baldrige National Quality Award for 1993.
    It's a $4 billion company with almost 18,000 employees in the 
manufacture of chemicals, fibers, and plastics for customers around the 
world. Under Ernest Davenport's leadership, the company has concentrated 
on teamwork aimed at quality management and a relentless effort to 
exceed customers' expectations. It's a strategy that works. For the last 
4 years, more than 70 percent of its 7,000 customers have ranked Eastman 
as their number one supplier.
    I say, also, that my experience with this company and the quality 
management work we did is one of the reasons that we decided to 
undertake the National Performance Review of the Federal Government, 
under the Vice President's leadership. And in that connection, I ask all 
of you to help us to achieve some of the systematic reforms that we are 
searching for that require some approval from the Congress, especially 
the reform of the personnel, the budgeting, and most importantly, the 
procurement systems of the Government. We could save a lot more money 
and increase our productivity if we were free to do that.
    Chuck Roberts, the vice president of Ames Rubber Corporation of 
Hamburg, New Jersey, said there are probably more people in this 
auditorium today than all the people who work at Ames. Now, when I read 
this, I found myself up here when Ron Brown was speaking trying to count 
the number of people in the auditorium. [Laughter] Four hundred and 
fifty people work at Ames, and I think there are at least 100 more than 
that here today. But it's quality and not quantity that's being 
measured. Still, even with 450 employees, Ames is the largest 
manufacturer in the world of rollers for mid- to large-size copiers. 
It's the small business winner of this year's Baldrige Award. At Ames, 
it's not unusual to find second- and third-generation employees with the 
company. The atmosphere is like family and like a team. Workers even 
call each other teammates. Every worker belongs to at least one of 40 
company groups dedicated to quality improvement. The impact of these 
groups collectively has been dramatic. Since 1989, it's increased 
productivity by 48 percent. And in the last 5 years, teammate ideas have 
saved the company and its customers more than $3 million. As a small 
producer in a large industry, Ames president and chief executive officer 
Joel Marvil, has made his company a model in applying quality 
management.
    One thing that distinguishes these two companies is that both have 
expanded the idea of partnership between companies and suppliers, 
between workers and managers, even partnership with the environment. 
Both these companies have been industry leaders in environmental safety, 
and their success has further proved that the choice between growth and 
the environment is a false one. In the end, we must find a way to have 
both.
    In our Nation, we know we have the brightest managers, the best 
workers, and the

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most advanced technologies. But we also have to prove that we can all 
put it together in ways that lead to increasing productivity, increasing 
jobs, and increasing incomes. I couldn't help thinking as I was 
reviewing the history of those of you who are winning this award today 
that if more American companies operated like you do, there would be 
much less anxiety when we have to make changes, like we did when we had 
to decide what to do about NAFTA, because a lot of opposition to NAFTA 
really had nothing to do with the terms of the agreement but instead had 
to do with the incredible anxiety that working people felt that their 
jobs and their incomes and their families weren't really all that 
important to their employers and that if there was some sort of short-
term advantage to be gained by a company, even if it led to the long-
term damage to their families, that the advantage would be chosen over 
the family.
    When you look at the long-term productivity of the kinds of 
companies that are really proving that you can make good money in 
America by using new partnerships with your workers, you see a level of 
security and trust and almost fanatic devotion to the cause of the 
enterprise, that if we had it everywhere, it would be much easier for 
America to take the steps we need to broaden our horizons, to reach out 
to other countries, to increase trade. So I thank you for that, and I 
hope other companies will follow your example because we need more 
people at work, happy, secure, and supporting the objectives that you 
have supported.
    Make no mistake about it, the winners of the Baldrige Award have 
done a great service for America, and they have done a service that only 
the private sector can provide in this great capitalist economy. This is 
a free enterprise system. Government has responsibilities to set a 
framework, to promote growth policy, to do those things which cannot be 
done in the private sector. But in the end we rise or fall economically 
based on whether our system is working for the benefit of the people 
that labor in it day in and day out. And given the fact that so much of 
our security today and in the future is a question of our economic 
security and our ability to compete and win, I think it is nowhere near 
an overstatement to say that these two companies, Ames Rubber and 
Eastman Chemical, have done a great service not just to themselves, 
their employees, and their customers but to the United States. And we 
congratulate them today.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:35 a.m. at the Mellon Auditorium.