Lateefah Simon: “if I may follow immediately on what Senator Kennedy just talked about, this Friday we are going to be taking up welfare…”

“if I may follow immediately on what Senator Kennedy just talked about, this Friday we are going to be taking up welfare reform. Ninety-five percent of what we hear about as welfare reform is not welfare reform. It is just moving the boxes around, shifting responsibility to States and doing some things like that. Real welfare reform has to deal with the problem of jobs and the problem of poverty, and this is an issue that deals with the problem of poverty. Why do we have this distribution problem in our society today? I think there are three basic reasons. One is people are not as well prepared as they should be. As Secretary of Labor Bob Reich says over and over--and he is right on this--if you are well prepared, technology is your friend; if you are not well prepared, technology is your enemy. A second reason we do not have the distribution factor that we should have in our society today is that labor union membership is dramatically lower in our country than any other Western industrialized democracy. George Shultz, former Secretary of State and former Secretary of Labor under Republican administrations, made a speech in which he said all of us, management and labor and everybody, ought to be concerned about the low percentage of workers belonging to labor unions. It is not a healthy thing for our society. If you exclude the governmental unions, it is down to 11.8 percent. That is a factor. But a third factor in the distribution matter is the minimum wage.”