Bill Clinton: “First of all, I think we do have a responsibility to them. And I think to address the responsibility, you have to ask…”

“First of all, I think we do have a responsibility to them. And I think to address the responsibility, you have to ask yourself first what is the problem and what is the answer to the problem. It is clear--what's happening basically is that in--this is the second great wave of restructuring. The first one occurred in the early eighties when a lot of manufacturing jobs were lost, and it went on for about 10 years. Now, in our administration we've been able to rebuild the number of manufacturing jobs. They're coming back up slowly, partly because we targeted automobiles and related industries and partly because the productivity of American manufacturing is so high. But what's happening--there are basically, I think, two things driving this. The overwhelming fact is that the information and technology revolution, the sort of the digital chip revolution, means that organizations in the future probably won't have as many middle managers and won't have as many people passing instructions down and information up. And then, of course, there are--the second problem is there are just differences from company to company over--particularly really big companies--if they think they have to sell off subsidiaries or other things that may change. There may be facts from company to company that are different, but it's obviously a sweeping change. So what is the answer? The first answer is to keep creating jobs and to create a higher percentage of high-paying jobs. In the last--in each year of the last 3 years, we have increased the percentage of our new jobs in the high-wage category from--in '92, before I became President, only about 20 percent of a very small number of new jobs that were created that year were in higher wage categories. In '93 it was 35 percent, then 45 percent, and in '95 over 55 percent. So the first thing we have--I know it's cold comfort if you're losing your job, but if you look at the economy as a whole, we have to keep trying to create higher wage jobs. For example, a lot of the middle managers from AT&T--let's just take AT&T--I'm going to come to the specific problem in a minute, but if you look at the problem all across the country, the fact that we finally passed telecommunications legislation that will unleash a lot of competition there will, it is estimated, create over 3 million jobs in the telecommunications area in the next few years; and a disproportionate share of those jobs will be higher wage-paying jobs in the range of those being lost by people being laid off by the big companies. So that's the first thing. Now, let's focus on the people themselves because--some of these people are being laid off, I think, just because of the drastic changes in the economy. I'm concerned that some of them feel that they're being laid off just because their companies want to save future--either earnings or health care or pension costs. We need to look at--and for the simple reason that a lot of these people are about my age. A lot of people who are losing their jobs now are about 50 years old. Their kids are just getting ready to go to college. And if you're in northern New Jersey, for example, and you just heard that--I'll just make this up--let's say Sprint is hiring 3,000 people in California, and 300 of them are going to be in doing more or less what you were doing, some area that you were trained for. If you've got a child who's a senior in high school, a child who's a junior in high school, and a child who's a sophomore in high school, it may not be so easy just to up and move. You know, if everybody in your neighborhood is losing their job and you've got a mortgage on your home, it may not be so easy to sell your home at a profit or at least to even net out. The real fundamental problem here is not only that there may not be enough jobs for these folks but they may not be where they live now or close enough to where they live to allow them to change their circumstances. Now, I think--we're looking at--first of all, let me say, we're looking at a number of things that we might be able to do to facilitate people who have been victimized by downsizing moving to a new life. And I don't want to get into a lot of specifics until I have time to research them all, but let me just say what the general problem is. The general problem is that most of the social safety nets for people who lose their jobs were constructed for a more static economy. For example, if you look at the unemployment system, the unemployment system we have today was constructed for a time when 85 percent of the people were called back to the same job they were laid off from. Today, 85 percent of the people are not called back to a job they were laid off from. If you look at the pension system, we thought as a nation that we had done a great thing, probably nearly 20 years ago now, whenever it was, when we reformed the ERISA system; you know, we passed ERISA and said if you worked 10 years for a company, you had pension rights that vested so your pension rights couldn't en- tirely be taken away from you. But now we know that you still have to work a long time to get full benefits, and pension rights aren't as portable as they might be. So we're going to have to look at ways to make--and a lot of these people, for example, who might leave a big corporation and want to set up a small business--we need to look for ways for them to somehow always be able to have greater portability in the pension system. The same thing is true with health care. A lot of people are reluctant to start their own businesses or go to work for a small business instead of a large business because they're afraid they won't have access to health care. And if we're going to move into a new world where a higher and higher percentage of people work for smaller companies and where there is more volatility in the job market, then you have to have lifetime access to education and training that starts immediately with no delay. You have to have access to health care and pensions, and they have to be somewhat portable. And then there have to be special, I think, efforts made for people who are in these higher wage categories where the jobs themselves may be disappearing from all big corporations to try to help them either start new businesses or find others to go into business with within reasonable distance of where they are now living. And there may be--another thing we're looking at is the question of whether the people who are being downsized who are near high unemployment urban areas, whether there might be some marriage that could be made between what we're doing with our empowerment zones and our enterprise communities and trying to encourage people to invest in the inner cities by giving certain special incentives for people who lose their jobs, to give them extra help through the SBA or otherwise to start a new venture of some kind.”