Remarks at the Carpenters Joint Apprenticeship Training Center in Las Vegas, Nevada

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 23, 1998

The President. Thank you. It's a good thing we've got a 22d amendment, or I would run again. Thanks for saying that. Let me begin by saying that when Maggie Carlton was talking, I leaned over to John Sweeney and I said, "John, I'd give anything if we could just get her speech on television tonight. That's the America we're trying to build for everybody."

I know that your husband and your daughters were proud of you, but I think every working man and woman out here was proud of you for what you said and what you represented. Your family is living proof that if we reward people for their work, if we enable people to succeed at work and at home raising their children, if we give them the chance to be good citizens, then America is going to do very well indeed.

I want to thank the others up here on this platform with me. I want to thank John Sweeney for his brilliant, energetic leadership of the labor movement. He has been terrific. I want to thank Doug McCarron for his leadership of the carpenters and his ever-present willingness to let me know exactly what he thinks ! should be doing on every issue. [Laughter] I want to thank Bob Georgine for many things, but I want to congratulate him most recently on helping to bring about the major labor agreement in Nevada between building and construction trade workers, Bechtel, and the Department of Energy, and so many other triumphs on behalf of the working people he represents. Thank you.

I am especially indebted to Linda Chavez-Thompson, the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, for her membership on the President's National Advisory Panel on Race, in our attempt to build an America in the 21st century where we all get along and work together across all the racial and ethnic lines that divide us. Thank you.

Let me also say I am profoundly grateful to my former colleague and longtime friend, Governor Bob Miller; and to Mayor Jan Jones who was such a great friend of my mother's, as well as a friend of mine, for their personal kindness to me, and their leadership here in this great city and State. You are very well served, and I know you know that. Thank you.

I brought a lot of folks with me today from the administration, but three in particular work with the labor movement. I thank the Deputy Secretary of Labor, Kitty Higgins, and Maria Echaveste and Karen Tramontano coming from the White House. They've worked with a lot of you, and they do a lot of work for you, whether you know it or not, every day. And I'm very proud of them.

Now, you know, I took a tour of what goes on here before I came out, and I told some of the folks on the tour - I thanked Bill Howard and Paul Sonner, who was the instructor in the classroom I visited, and all the people who are in the Joint Apprenticeship Training Center today who helped to enlighten me about what you're doing. But I told some folks that 30 years ago I actually spent a summer building houses, and I decided I didn't want to work that hard, which is how come I got into politics. [Laughter] It didn't strike me as being any easier now than it was 30 years ago. [Laughter]

But there are a lot of interesting things going on in this program. I hope, for example, that just my presence here and the fact that so many members of the media came with us will lead people to know that more and more construction is now being done with reprocessed steel instead of wood in homes and hotels and other things. And that has enormous environmental and energy implications for the future, if we can make that work, and that you are being trained to do that work.

I do feel that I learned enough today to go home and build a two-bedroom house for Socks and for Buddy, and that's what I intend to do. [Laughter] Unfortunately, when I do it, I won't earn the union wage, but I will have your knowledge.

Let me say to all of you that, first, I just want to thank you for giving me a chance to be here. You know, every now and then you just have to get out here in the country; it helps the President to remember why he ran, what he's trying to do, and for whom he is really working. And I have seen all of that here today.

You here have shown me a model of two-by-fours and teamwork; a model for the Nation of cooperation between business and labor; cooperation of crafts across generations, adapting old-fashioned values to today's workplace. There are just 653 days left in the 20th century; there are just 653 days left in this whole millennium. This century will be remembered as a time when millions of working men and women fought for and won basic freedoms too long denied them: the right to safe workplaces; the freedom to organize; the ability to put an end to abusive child labor; the right to have health insurance and retirement and earn a decent wage for labor. Working families across our country gained their voice in the 20th century, and in so doing, they built the greatest middle class in human history.

Now, what will happen in the new century? Well, what will it be like; how will it be different? The first thing we know is that things will change more and faster for all of you in the new century than it did in the old one. The sheer volume of knowledge is changing - is doubling, doubling, every 5 years. When I became President there were 50 web sites on the Internet - 50 - 5, 0. Now, 65,000 are being added every hour. So your life is going to go by at a faster pace.