[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 4 (Monday, February 1, 1999)]
[Pages 137-141]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Employment Initiative in Oakton, Virginia

January 28, 1999

    Thank you. I would say this is a fairly high energy crowd here 
today. [Laughter] Thank you for making us all feel so welcome. Thank 
you, Cheryl Simms. She was nervous as a cat. [Laughter] And I said, 
``Look, Cheryl, that microphone, it will carry your voice. Just pretend 
you're talking to a friend or two.'' And I think she did a fine job, 
don't you? Let's give her a hand. [Applause]
    I'd like to thank Mirian Graddick and Mary Jane McKeever for making 
us feel so welcome here today. I thank Secretary Herman and Secretary 
Riley for their wonderful work on the announcements I am about to make. 
I want to thank my longtime friend Senator Chuck Robb for being a 
terrific Senator for the State of Virginia and on education issues for 
all the United States.
    And I'd like to recognize two Members of the House of 
Representatives who are here, who have been very, very active on these 
issues: Congressman Tim Roemer from Indiana, and Representative Dennis 
Kucinich from Cleveland, Ohio. Thank you for being here, both of you.
    I also want to thank the Vice President for his interest in this. 
Not very long ago, just a couple of weeks ago, he convened a national 
meeting with business, education, labor, and government leaders to come 
up with proposals that will further our efforts

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to promote lifelong learning. I want to say one other thing: There is a 
member of my staff who worked very hard on this who is leaving the White 
House, but she had a lot to do with this announcement I'm making today. 
Her name is Cecilia Rouse, and she's going back to be a professor. But I 
wish she were staying with us. Thank you very much, Cecilia, for what 
you've done.
    I wanted to come here because this is a picture--a picture I hope 
will be in newspapers all across America tomorrow. I hope this picture 
will be on some television stations tonight. I want Americans to be able 
to visualize the kind of continuing lifelong learning opportunities that 
you have that I want for all Americans.
    I want to compliment AT&T, the CWA, the IBEW, and Lucent 
Technologies. This workers alliance, I was told, since its inception in 
the mid-eighties has given way over 100,000 people the chance to come 
through here and get education and training. That is profoundly 
important. And it's important not just for people who work for AT&T, who 
are in the communications business.
    I recently learned about a man in my home State who was 50 years 
old, had an eighth grade education, ran a conveyor belt for a company 
that converted to a new computerized transport system. Since he only had 
an eighth grade education, he was computerphobic, to say the least, and 
he was afraid that he would lose his job. Instead, he enrolled in a 
training program, learned how to use computers, improved his reading and 
math skills so that he could master complex, technical manuals. And 
instead of losing his job, he got a raise.
    Now, a lot of you have been through more than one training program 
since you've been employed. I just met a gentleman who said he spent 
over 300 hours in this program, in alliance programs. And if you think 
about how almost every form of work today is different from what it was 
just a few years ago and how rapidly the nature of work is changing, we 
are going to be challenged to change our whole conception of what 
education is.
    You know, a lot of you came from families like mine. I mean, my 
grandfather had a grade-school education; my stepfather, who raised me, 
didn't finish high school; my mother went to nursing school, never went 
to college; my father's uncle, who served three terms in the 
legislature, dropped out of school after the eighth grade to support the 
family. They all did just fine. Now--and all you have to do is look at 
the census data; you don't just have to tell family stories--if you look 
at the census data, high school graduates are likely to get jobs where 
their incomes drop over time, not go up. People who have the equivalent 
of at least 2 years of college and can keep on learning for a lifetime 
are likely to get jobs where their incomes go up and, if they lose their 
jobs, to find jobs that are as good or better.
    So what we have now is a situation in America where the income gap, 
that we all know widened over the previous 20 years or so, is largely a 
skills gap and that it applies across all kinds of industries. We have 
to close that skills gap.
    In 1992, when I took office, I said we had two deficits. We had a 
budget deficit and an investment deficit in our people. Well, thanks to 
Senator Robb and the Members of the House that are here, we've closed 
the budget deficit; we've got a surplus. But we still have a deficit in 
investment in our people. We have got to find a way to create in 
America, not only world-class public schools and access to college 
education--and you may have heard me say in the State of the Union 
Address that, with the tax credits, the Pell grants, and the other 
things, no one should ever fail to go to college because of the cost, 
now--but we have to create a situation in America where people can keep 
on learning for a lifetime, without regard to where they live, what 
their job is, what their income is.
    Why? Well, just a couple of statistics. In manufacturing, 88 percent 
of the companies--I want to say that again--88 percent of the companies 
say they're having trouble finding qualified applicants to fill at least 
one kind of job in their operation. One in five companies says, today, 
it literally cannot expand its operation, even though the markets are 
there, because they don't have workers with the right skills.
    You heard, I think, the Senator said that there are jobs going 
begging right here in the DC area. You've got high unemployment

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in DC, job vacancies in the communities outside. In America as a whole, 
there are over a quarter of a million high-tech jobs, computer-related 
jobs, vacant this day. We may have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 
years, but we've got a quarter of a million high-wage jobs going vacant 
this day.
    And there are places where the economic recovery hasn't hit, because 
people can't get the investment or because they don't have the skills to 
do these jobs.
    Now, that's really why I wanted to come here. I want America to work 
like this place does. I want there to be an American alliance. I want 
workers who aren't lucky enough to be represented by the CWA or the IBEW 
to have access to lifetime learning. I want employers who may not have 
the resources of AT&T or Lucent Technologies to know that there is some 
way they can work with their employees to give them access to these kind 
of skills.
    And in the State of the Union Address I just barely mentioned this, 
and so I wanted to come here to tell you the things, the specific things 
that I intend to propose that are in our budget. First, we need a 
national campaign to dramatically increase our efforts at basic adult 
education and family literacy, to help the millions and millions of 
adults who struggle with basic reading or math.
    People that cannot fill out a job application cannot be expected to 
fill a 21st century job. You know, when Alexis told that old Getty 
joke--I love that--rise early, work hard, strike oil. It's good; it 
keeps us humble, reminds you there's a little bit of luck in life. 
[Laughter] But the oil today is in your noggin, not in the ground. And 
everybody can strike oil today. But they have to have the means to do 
it.
    This country has been greatly enriched, particularly by our 
immigrant populations. But I went to a school not very long ago, 
Senator, in Virginia, and they asked me in advance if there was any way 
we had time to have consecutive translation of my remarks, first in 
Spanish and then in Arabic, so the parents of the children at the school 
would understand the speech I was giving to their kids.
    Now, I can tell you in a global economy this is not a bad deal; this 
is a good deal. But it is not a good deal when you think about--it's 
going to be hard enough for us all to understand our different racial 
and ethnic and cultural and religious traditions and figure out how to 
get all that together, if we can't even read one another's words or 
understand each other. And if a certain group of people are locked out 
of the whole new economy, not because they're not intelligent and not 
because they don't work like crazy but because they literally can't plug 
in because their mind doesn't have the connections.
    And that is very, very important. So we're going to seek new tax 
credits for businesses like the two that sponsored the alliance, which 
provide basic skills to their workers. And we will work to greatly 
expand the funding for basic adult education and high school completion 
programs.
    You read all these stories about inner cities, where there are all 
these young single people, unemployed. Nearly all of them dropped out of 
high school. And it's going to be difficult to get some of them into 
some of the training programs we want unless we can get them to come 
back and finish high school, get their GED, and then go forward. And so 
this is a very, very important thing.
    Secondly, I'm going to recommend a large new investment in the 
worker training system we revolutionized last year. You heard previous 
speakers mention it. But basically what we did was to take all these 
Government programs, 40 or 50 of them, collapse them into a single 
skills grant and one-stop shopping, so that if somebody is eligible 
right now for Federal help and training, instead of having to go to this 
program, that program, the other program, they go to one place, get a 
skills grant, and they can decide how to spend the money, where it is 
most likely to give them the training that will most likely give them a 
job.
    But the program is underfunded today. It will not cover all the 
people who need it. So over the next 5 years I've asked for funds 
sufficient for us to be able to provide appropriate training and 
reemployment services for all Americans who lose their jobs--all 
Americans.

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    Now, next year we will increase the funding for skill grants, high-
tech community career centers and rapid response teams by more than $360 
million under our budget.
    Third, I want to greatly increase our programs and our commitment to 
helping disadvantaged young people. We'll nearly double the funding for 
YouthBuild, an innovative program that gives young people a chance to 
learn construction skills to build homes for low-income families, on the 
job. We will double the funding for our GEAR UP program, one of my 
favorite programs; it's a mentoring and tutoring initiative I mentioned 
earlier, which involves sending college students out into middle schools 
to mentor students, to get them to both learn their lessons and stay in 
school but also to raise their sights and believe no matter how poor 
their circumstances, they can go on to college and do well. And it's a 
great program.
    We are also going to continue our investments in what we call youth-
opportunity areas, to try to go into these areas where there are a lot 
of kids just walking the streets, and there aren't any jobs, to try to 
get these kids off the streets--either back in the schools, or into 
jobs. If we cannot deal with the challenges faced by these young people 
now, with the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the first budget 
surplus in 30 years and the smallest percentage of the American people 
on welfare in 29 years, we will never get around to doing this. Now is 
the time for us to try to bring these young people into the mainstream 
of American life.
    We also are going to try to expand more partnerships. You have 
proved here that it takes people working together to make something like 
this go. We have a new initiative called ``Right-Track Partnerships,'' 
to help schools, businesses, and community organizations work together 
to reduce teen dropout rates and to help former dropouts come back, 
building on what we did last year, directed especially toward Hispanic 
young people, because the dropout there is far higher than for any group 
in America.
    Let me just tell you, though, you all know that we need more than a 
high school education to do what you guys are doing; so even if you 
didn't have one once, with all the training programs, you've got to have 
more. In 1989, 10 years ago this coming fall, I met with all the other 
Governors and the then-President of the United States, George Bush, to 
set some national education goals. One of our goals was that we would 
have an on time high school completion rate of 90 percent. That was one 
of our goals.
    We knew that some people would drop out regardless, you know, that 
just would happen. In 1989--well, 1998, last year, a wonderful thing 
happened. For the first time since we've been keeping these statistics, 
the last 20 or 30 years, the on time African-American high school 
graduation rate was almost identical to the on time high school 
graduation rate of white children. It was about--between 83 and 84 
percent. That's the good news.
    There's two pieces of bad news. Bad news piece number one is it's 
not 90 percent. And that's 16, 17 percent of the people we have to 
figure out how to get back to school and how to get education and 
training. And for Hispanic young people, many of whom have language 
barriers that cause them after the eighth grade not to be able to keep 
up, the dropout rate is still over 40 percent. So we must do more here.
    And it's something I'd like to ask you all to think about. And here 
in Virginia, Northern Virginia, you've got a lot of young people from 
all over the world, as the school districts get increasingly diverse--
these kids have fine minds, but it will be harder for them, and the 
longer they go on in school without a complete mastery of English and 
access to learning, the more the difficult courses will become more out 
of reach. And if they get bored, they'll drop out eventually. So I ask 
for your help and attention.
    Finally, let me say that I'm very gratified by the broadbased 
support that this initiative seems to have attracted among the American 
people. I think it's because everybody knows that what you're doing is 
what we all need to do for the future. But I would ask you to remember 
this day, to talk to your friends and neighbors who you may never have 
mentioned this to, to find out whether all the people that work in their 
workplaces have access to these sort of training programs.
    But remember, what we're trying to do in this balanced budget now is 
we've closed the

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budget deficit, now we've got to close the skills deficit. We cannot 
have the earnings gap in America, the income gap bigger because we 
didn't make the skills gap smaller. Now is the time to do it. We will 
never have a better time. And we will all--all--be richly rewarded when 
we have more stories like the ones I heard here from the Alliance today.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 2:02 p.m. in the Atrium at the AT&T 
Facility. In his remarks, he referred to Cheryl E. Simms, worker, who 
introduced the President, Mirian M. Graddick, senior vice president of 
human resources, and Mary Jane McKeever, president, government markets, 
AT&T. The President also referred to the Communications Workers of 
America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 
(IBEW).