Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, some corporations are doing different things. If I tell you that--I mean, if I answer the question…”

“Well, first of all, some corporations are doing different things. If I tell you that--I mean, if I answer the question in the way you asked it, the inference will be inescapable that they could have done something different. I've never looked at AT&T's books. I've never looked at their long-term prospects. I don't know what their corporate strategy is. So I make no judgment about any of this. I don't know enough about any of these companies' specific situations to know. I know AT&T got into some businesses that they couldn't make run; they had to get out of them. And when they got out of them and divided, they had more folks than they needed. But I don't have a judgment about what else could be done. I will tell you what I would do. I can tell you what I would do if I were running my own company that had a defined mission, where we were in the line of business like--whether it would be steel manufacturing or digital chips or whatever. I think the first thing you'd want to do is to set in motion--set up a relationship between the management and the work force so that the work force feels it's always involved in the corporate culture and the corporate mission and they know what the deal is. It's always easier to live with a tough decision if you know what the deal is, if you really trust it and believe it. Secondly, I would set up a system in which both the gains and the losses of the company were evenly shared. If you look at Nucor Steel, for example, it's a very popular steel mill, a profitable steel mill. They've got 15 mills, I think, in the United States. They have a no layoff policy. And they tell you when you go in, ``We have a no layoff policy, so if we lose money, you're going to get your pay cut, but at least you won't lose your job. And if we lose money your pay will be cut, but management's pay will be cut by a higher percentage than yours will be, if we lose money.'' And they explain to you how it works. So needless to say, it's easier to bear the burdens--it depends on whether they--if they're doing well, you do well; if they're doing poorly, you do poorly, but so do the people running the show. Then I think when you have--if you're in some--but not everybody can have a no layoff policy. If we had to have a layoff policy, I would attempt to find something for these people to do while they're being laid off, if they could ever be called back. For example, I was at Harman International in southern California a few days ago. They are among the most successful makers of electronic speakers in the world. Sometimes the orders fall off. And they depend on orders from Europe as well as here. So they set up something called Ole. They've got a lot of Hispanic--Latinos in their work force. It stands for off-line enterprises. And they took all the scrap materials in their main line of production, and they said, ``What all kind of products can we make out of this?'' They made clocks out of it--like the wood that they didn't use for the speaker cabinets. And they gave all the people--whenever they had to lay them off, they gave them an opportunity to work in the off-line enterprises. And they even gave the manufacturing workers a chance to become sales people in their stores and to their distributors and all that. The point is all the--not that they save every job, but all the work force can see they were making an extra effort to save people. If I had to downsize a lot of middle managers, I would--and I had the money to do it--I would do an exhaustive study of what kind of options were available to find other productive endeavors for them and to what extent I could afford to maintain their benefits until they found something else to do--how could they keep the integrity of the retirement benefits and their health care benefits, for example--and whether or not in the severance between the company they could cash out some benefits and do something else which might help them to either go into business for themselves or form partnerships or do other things. And again, I would say, I make no judgment on any of these companies. I do not know enough about the facts in any of the operating--but I basically believe that some people think that global markets and technology means people aren't very important. But I believe that global markets and technology mean that people are more important than ever before, because if you look at what's going to happen-- technology is mobile; money is mobile; management is mobile; and labor costs--even if you have high labor costs, labor costs will become a smaller and smaller and smaller element of most productive enterprises, even services; certainly manufacturing. And therefore, people that have a fanatically loyal work force that is highly pro- ductive, that feels that they're involved in a common enterprise, and can take a punch--because times won't always be good in business; that's what a free enterprise system is all about--they're going to tend to do very well. But I do want to say to you, look, this is not an easy problem. And I'm going to do everything I can to take this issue and do what I've tried to do with every other issue with the American people, and that is come up with a very constructive solution. I don't think it's particularly productive for us to spend a lot of time in idle criticism. What we need to do is to find ways for these people who are being downsized to go on with their lives. And I want to say, too, the American people need this. This is not just a matter of sympathy. This is a terrible waste for the American people to have to see people at this level of talent and capacity, who can serve our country so well in so many different ways, lie idle and fall on serious misfortune. So we've got to find ways to do it. But it needs to be seen for what it is. It is something that is happening because of this period of transition when the instruments of flexible--we haven't developed a flexible safety net to deal with the problems these people have.”