Bill Clinton: “Yes, or they hire people who come out there. Either they relocate there or hire people who come out of there so…”

“Yes, or they hire people who come out there. Either they relocate there or hire people who come out of there so that--but we're looking at--there are seven or eight things that I've got our staff working on now, where we're looking at various things that we could do to try to facilitate people who are going to be downsized, moving back into the work force. Because the truth is a lot of these people are at their most productive years. We don't need to be without the benefit of their experience and their efforts. And it is devastating to them psychologically as well as economically to be without a job and without prospects of a job. So it's a terrible problem. And so when I talk about it, the economy is doing better. To give you an example, if you look at the other six big economies in the G-7, all of us together have created a net of 8.4 million jobs, the American figure. The other 6 have created a net of zero jobs. So we shouldn't sneeze at the fact that we're creating new jobs. That's a good thing. The European unemployment rate is twice ours. But we shouldn't be insensitive to people who are being downsized and people that these huge structural changes in the economy--are having their lives disrupted because of them. This is, after all, let me say again, this is a period of most profound change in the American economy really in 100 years, since we moved from farm to factory, from the rural area to cities and towns. We're now moving into an age where all production and services are dominated by information technology and all markets are global. And that is changing not only the nature of work, it is changing the nature of work organizations. And our society--no society has kept up. And that's why I've pushed for all the things I have, for lifetime learning and portable pensions and constant access to health care, because in a volatile environment like this, what our objective as Americans should be is to keep the job engine going. We should keep trying to create more jobs and, as I said, to make them more and more high-wage jobs. But we should also recognize that all the high-wage jobs in the world are cold comfort if you lose a good job and there's not another one anywhere near you, particularly if you have a lot of built-in family responsibilities. And we're going to have to develop a whole new set of flexible systems of family and work security that will allow the economy to continue to be dynamic and grow but will help people like those folks that are being displaced now.”