Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America in Boston, Massachusetts - President Bill Clinton - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 3, 1993

We start, I think as we must, with honoring and rewarding work. Just 17 days into this administration, we made family and medical leave the law of the land after 8 years of gridlock and delay and two vetoes. Hardworking men and women now can know that if they have to take a little time off for a genuine family problem, they can do it without losing their jobs.

Again I say, I heard all the clamor about what a terrible bill this was. And I looked around the world, and a hundred and some nations have found a way to give family leave that we just couldn't find it in our heart, our minds, a way to provide before we got around to doing it. It's time Americans put their actions where their rhetoric is, and that's what this administration is trying to do.

Forty-four days into the administration we were called upon to extend unemployment compensation to hundreds of thousands of jobless men and women, something now Congress will do as a matter of course without regard to party. Everybody is willing to pay people to remain unemployed. But this time we changed the law so that we spend a small portion of that money to offer the unemployed new opportunities for job training and counseling to try to move them back to work more quickly, based on a New Jersey experiment which shows clearly that we can do that if we don't just pay people to stay out of work but we take some of that money to get them back to work.

That's why we are trying to dramatically increase the earned-income tax credit to working poor people. It is a solemn commitment to those who work, who care for our sick or tend to our children or do our most difficult and tiring jobs, that we're going to do our best to enshrine in our tax law and in our country's life the principle that if you work for a living 40 hours a week and you've got children in the house, you should not live in poverty. I think that is an important principle and one that's worth fighting for.

That is why I tried for several weeks to pass an emergency jobs program through the Congress which, I want to point out, I did not campaign on in the campaign of 1992. I ran a fiscally responsible campaign. I did not offer to do anything that we did not pay for in the moment we did it. And this jobs program was a responsible approach based on the fact that the American economy was not producing new jobs, even though we were allegedly into the second year of a recovery.

We're supposed to be in the 24th month of a recovery, according to the economic statistics. But jobs have increased by only eight-tenths of one percent. And private sector jobs have not increased in that period. If we were following the trend of typical past recoveries, jobs would have grown by more than 7 percent. We are still 3.5 million jobs behind the rate generated in a normal economic recovery. And we have reclaimed only one-half the jobs we lost in the last recession. This past week, jobless claims went up yet again. At a time in which 16 million men and women are out of work or looking for full-time work with part-time jobs, I'm fighting to give them a chance to earn a paycheck, to do useful work, to support their families, to contribute to their communities.