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SENATOR BILL BRADLEY
JANUARY 31, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
Retiring Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey has written a new book, Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir, in which he expresses concern that great leaps in productivity from the information revolution mainly benefit shareholders and management. He talks about the future of the American workforce with David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report".
DAVID GERGEN: "Time present, time past," now that's a phrase from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". Aside from the fact that you come from Missouri and T.S. Eliot comes from Missouri, but why that title for this book of memoirs and reflections?
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Well, because the next line says that perhaps contained in time future, which means that the title is about my roots, growing up in Crystal City, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, what a small town life met to me; about time present, representing New Jersey, an Eastern state in the national legislature. And it implies time future, meaning life isn't over. I'm leaving the Senate, but I'm not leaving public life.
DAVID GERGEN: So the stream continues on?
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: That's right.
DAVID GERGEN: And your life. Now, you, you write--that's interesting--you write here that while you were in the Senate, you learned to look at the big picture and that it one time looked at questions, for example, of race, or at other times looked at the question of the tax code. More recently, and in your last chapter in your book and in other places in your book, and in some of your public discussions, you've been talking about the economic transformation that's been taking place in America. What do you think the heart of that is?
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: The heart of it is that there are 130 million jobs in America. Nine million of them do repetitive tasks, and each one of them is potentially endangered by the information revolution, that at the same time it's making us more productive and profitable and competitive and wealthy is also jeopardizing millions of American jobs. For example, in the first, first six months of the Clinton administration in 1993, they announced that they created 1.6 million new jobs, and a TWA mechanic heard that, when he heard that number he said, yeah, my wife and I have four of them.
DAVID GERGEN: Part-time jobs.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: But when you look at the one point three or one point six million, about seven hundred thousand are part-time jobs. I mean, one of the largest employers in America is Manpower, Inc., a temporary job employer.
DAVID GERGEN: All right. And you think this transformation is going to continue in terms of those 90 million jobs, those are at risk, and so this is--we're likely to see a continual downsizing, continual replacement of technology.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: No. I think that it is inevitable, given the direction we're going. Now, not all 9 million are going to lose their job, but a lot of people are going to lose their job, and the people who are going to lose their job are those who have been doing it reasonably well, working hard, playing by the rules, and then suddenly the boss comes in and says, you're out.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: And it's a disorienting experience. It raises major questions about trust, about loyalty, about commitment, things that we've kind of taken for granted. And my concern is that while this is a good thing overall for the whole economy, we do not and cannot allow the middle class to be put at risk by this transformation.
DAVID GERGEN: All right. What do we do?
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Well, I think that we have to recognize that private power, the only thing that balances private power is public power, and sometimes private power, maximizing its own profit, which is what it should do, sometimes has the detrimental impact on the people in the process, these middle class Americans who are losing their jobs, their health care, and their pensions, so at a minimum, I think what we could do is to say that companies that have more than 100 workers and who fire workers with 10 years or more has to provide health care for that worker for at least one year after they are finished.
DAVID GERGEN: Pay the health care?
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Yeah. Pay the health care for that year.
DAVID GERGEN: And benefits.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Benefits.
DAVID GERGEN: And then there ought to be portability with the health care, itself. The worker ought to be able to carry--
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: The worker could carry the pension. Hopefully it would make portability for pensions.
DAVID GERGEN: For pensions.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Yeah. For example, a guy in New Jersey came up to me not so long ago and said, look, I've worked in this place 22 years, but this place has been owned by three separate companies, and in no one of them did I vest, so I'm not going to retire, I don't have a pension. If he had portability, he could have carried a basic pension with him.
DAVID GERGEN: And for many workers who work for small businesses, there are no pensions at all.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: No pensions at all.
DAVID GERGEN: You say in your book the percentage of American workers now covered by pensions has gone down from like 50 percent to 43 percent.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Yes. As well as health care coverage is down, as well as wages. I mean, the fact of the matter is that the job loss threat comes on top of a stagnant wage. For about 70 to 80 percent of the workers in this country who are non-supervisory or production workers. In 1973,
they made $315 average, in 1994, they made $256 average. So they have seen a long decline, a long stagnation. Their spouse has gone into the work place in order to make ends meet. Now, two people who are working bring home a paycheck just about to cover where they were before in terms of real buying power.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Now, they've gotten some increased fringes, but as the decrease in pensions and health care indicate, not that much. The economic problem of America is inadequate economic growth unfairly shared, and frankly, if you don't address that, if you don't see that as a problem, then you're not going to be able to get an answer.
DAVID GERGEN: And your answer to growth would be to get the deficits down.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Get the deficits down, keep the economy open, don't go to protectionism, make investments in research, reward innovation, that's the way we should go.
DAVID GERGEN: Now, how does one deal with the question of as you say unfairly shared? Because even if you give workers--if you equip them with pensions and health care benefits and training so that they can move on to the next job, many corporations, which are more productive, are not necessarily paying their workers who stay higher incomes.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Well, that's true. You look at Chrysler. 70 percent of their automobile is now out-sourced, and it's out-sourced to companies that are competing with lower-wage workers, in some cases non-union workers. My own sense is that I don't think America realizes how important the union movement was to the working wage of Americans. The fact that only 16 percent of the workers in America now are represented by a union has got to have some relation to the fact that their wages have stagnated for a lot of years. I don't want this country to move into the kind of union relationship that a lot of European countries have, but clearly, there is a major opportunity for thinking through how to hear the voices of those who are, you are employing . Unions are one. They're not the only way to do that, though, but the idea is that as long as you have these great leaps in productivity and the productivity bonus that we're getting from the information revolution is taken primarily by shareholders and by management--
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: --and you're going to have these disproportionate incomes, so you have to figure a way to get that productivity bonus shared with more of the workers and with the society at large.
DAVID GERGEN: You have an idea which I have not seen advocated elsewhere and that is to create more jobs in the civil society to address our social needs: mentors, basketball coaches, music directors, nurses, and others.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Well, you ask yourself, David, here we are in the midst of the information revolution and whole credit departments, the 300 people, are being replaced by 10 computer work stations. Three hundred people in accounts receivable are being replaced by five computer work stations. Where can't you replace people with a computer in our current world, and that happens to be one of the places, is in those person-to-person relationships that transform lives. Those occur more likely in our civil society, in churches, synagogues, mosques, community development corporations, institutions of our communities.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: The problem there is there isn't sufficient manpower, and one of the things I think we have to look at is taking some of that productivity bonus and through government recycling it to the institution--
DAVID GERGEN: How do you channel that in? How do you do that?
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Well, you can do--one of the things you can do is do less money through the hierarchical bureaucracy. People ask, you know, what happened to the Democrats, where did they go wrong?
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: I mean, the Republicans went wrong because they'd simply say government is the enemy of freedom, and we want to devolve government to the state
level. That's a narrow constitutional dispute. I'm a child of declaration, I don't believe that, but that's my own perspective. But I think where Democrats went wrong is that we denied what was obvious to many people in America, which is that the people who get a lot of their tax dollars are often the loudest, are the ones with the best paid lobbyists, and we sought compromises, gave a little bit to everybody, as opposed to principle that said no to somebody. And here we have an opportunity to say we're not defending big bureaucracy, we are, instead, taking those resources--
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: --and recycling them to the institutions of civil society.
DAVID GERGEN: So that--well, in effect, one idea that some conservatives have put forward--Dan Coates, among others--is to give a tax--instead of giving a tax deduction to give a tax credit for those people who give money to charities that employ people.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: Well, I think that I wouldn't do it through the tax code, because I'd like to see the tax code with the lowest possible rates and the fewest loopholes. I mean, I'd like to see a tax code with two or three rates, max as low as 30 percent and lower. So I wouldn't do it through the code, but the idea of taking some of that public dollar and moving it out of the bureaucracies and into the institutions where people of values and integrity are doing the work is important because there's another dimension to this. Not only is the next chapter of the American narrative going to be written to try to describe understanding the information revolution and how it impacts people's lives, but it is also going to be written with an understanding that there are millions of people in America today who are searching for something beyond the material. And in the institutions of civil society, there are people there because of their commitment to their fellow human being, because they believe it's their obligation to be there. I was out in Denver not so long ago, and I talked to--asked a group of religious leaders, tell me, do you really think that people are searching more than they ever have before for something beyond the material?
DAVID GERGEN: For meaning.
SEN. BILL BRADLEY: For meaning, right, and a nun said to me, "Of course, Senator, why do you think there's a perfume called 'Eternity'?". The point is that, yeah, it's out there, and therefore we should strengthen those people who are already in the midst of the turmoil, doing the job anyway because of their commitment to other human beings, give them some more resources to do that job.
DAVID GERGEN: Thank you very much. You're a man with a message. Thank you.
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