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Archived News Release--Caution:
information may be out of date.
For more information call: 202/219-8211.
Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich today warned that budget
cuts proposed this week by Republican lawmakers will hurt millions of adults
and youth who need new job skills and summer work.
"The Republican budgets wave the white flag at the next
century's greatest challenge," Reich said in a White House news conference with
Education Secretary Richard Riley. "If we accept the Domenici-Kasich surrender,
more than 2 million adults won't get the help they need to build new skills or
find work. If we accept the Domenici-Kasich surrender, nearly one million young
people -- one million young people who want to work -- won't get summer jobs."
Senator Pete Dominici and Representative John Kasich presented budget proposals
earlier this week that would severely cut job training programs.
"Millions of workers are caught in the downdraft of
corporate restructuring, defense downsizing and the upheaval in health care.
Millions more are being challenged as never before by technology and global
competition," Reich said. "Cuts in education and job skills take us in
precisely the wrong direction. We're all committed to reducing the deficit, but
these cuts are grotesquely misguided. They will have serious consequences for
real people.
"Congressman Kasich recently dismissed job training as
something nobody really cared about. But in the last few months, I've met
several people who could set him straight. A former assembly worker in
Hartford, Connecticut who got new skills at a community college to become an
operator of a numerically controlled machine tools and computer aided
manufacturing. A single mother in Kansas City who went from being a cashier on
the brink of welfare to being a $12-an-hour desktop publishing specialist. And
in Seattle, a former aerospace worker who acquired new skills and is now
earning a living as a systems analyst and making what he earned before he lost
his aerospace job."
Reich warned that the budget cuts will further widen a
growing economic split in American society. After WWII America grew together,
he said, as living standards rose for all citizens -- rich, poor, and
in-between. But today, instead of growing together, Americans are growing
apart.
"Our middle class is in peril," Reich said. "When
education and skills are the fault line dividing our workforce into those who
are prospering and those who are losing ground, it makes no sense to burn the
bridges. More Americans -- not fewer -- need a chance to make it across that
divide."
Archived News Release--Caution:
information may be out of date.
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