Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Speaks At White House Summit On Working Families - New York Regional Forum

May 12, 2014

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you everyone. Thank you especially to Latifa Lyles for her extraordinary work at the Women’s Bureau. And it’s the kind of work that we need to focus on. And she keeps the fires burning for the kind of changes we need. I want to thank her. I want to thank our tremendous Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, who is really a shining light of understanding on what working people need. He speaks up for it even when it goes against the grain of some of our national debate. And I always have to say, everyone at the Labor Department is exemplifying the kind of changes we need in this city. Let’s give them all a round – in the nation I should say. Let’s give them all a round of applause.

[Applause]

You have an extraordinary group of people gathered today. You’re going to hear from some of the great leaders of this city and state in the course of the day. You’re going to hear from Valerie Jarrett, I believe – and that’s a tremendous honor for all of us to have her hear. I want to thank everyone who put together this conference, and all of the sponsors. I want to single out the Center for American Progress, that we’ve done a lot of work with on the initiatives that you’re talking about today and that have been so central to our administration. And so thank you to everyone for being a part of this.

And look, I’ll be very brief, it comes down to this – the question I think everyone in this room thinks about – the central question that should be coursing through our national debate is what do working families need? It’s as simple as that. It’s not that so many of these things can be considered optional if we want to have a successful nation. We in New York City have looked at this reality over the last year and come to the clear conclusion that if our working families are going to succeed in an incredibly challenging economic context, in a dynamic in which the middle class has been in decline for decades. If our working families are going to succeed, we have to do things differently. We have to be aggressive and we have to be creative. And when our working families succeed, it sets the foundation for the success of our entire society. Again, I think I’m preaching to the converted. But when you actually look issue by issue how things play out, you might think there’s some controversy over this question. From the perspective of us in New York City at this moment, we don’t see any controversy. We see this as foundational for what we have to do to move ahead as a city.

We think that addressing the whole range of issues affecting families is necessary to create a strong and stable city. We think that an economy that is inclusive is the only kind of economy that can actually engender strength and stability going forward.

And on – a lot of issues you’ll look at today play right into this reality, but the one that pulls at me in a particular way is the question of income inequality. And the numbers really are sobering and they should tell us that right now we’re in a moment in our history where you have to make fundamental change. We know that we have the greatest income inequality since the 1920s. We know it’s growing. We know that that is not a formula for a strong and inclusive and stable society. Some of the numbers – I’ll be very quick, but you need to hear this. The Pew Research Center did a study – and this really says it all – they asked the same question in 2008 as they asked this year. In 2008, 53 percent of Americans viewed themselves as middle class. Only 25 percent viewed themselves as lower income. By this year, 44 percent view themselves as middle class and 40 percent viewed themselves as lower income. People know the stresses that they are going through. Working families understand how much harder it is to make ends meet. They’re looking for solutions at every level and they know, sadly, that some of those solutions that historically we might have assumed would come out of the federal government have been stymied. And so they’re demanding more from the state and local level.

And at the local level, we feel people’s struggles very sharply, very distinctly because we talk to our constituents because they live next to us. And we feel their challenges very personally, as we should. And we know something that another recent study showed us. The question posed to Americans across the country was if they could come up with $1,000 for an emergency expense if some trouble befell them, could they come up with another $1,000 – 64 percent, nearly two-thirds in this survey said no they couldn’t. And that puts it in perspective the fact that so many American families are living that close, economically, to the edge that they know even a little dislocation would throw them off entirely. And that’s what we at the local level hear from our constituents all the time.

In New York City, we have determined to address this forcefully, to go at income inequality with a variety of tools. You heard earlier what we’d done with paid sick leave. And I’m very proud of the fact that now paid sick leave will reach another half million New Yorkers who didn’t have it before. That will change their lives for the better. It’s a little more stability, it’s a little more continuity in their pay. It’s a little less uncertainty, a little more decency in their lives. It’s the kind of thing people had not been seeing enough of in recent years that now has to be a template for so many other changes.

We’re doing that with an aggressive plan to create affordable housing, because we know if you’re going to address income inequality, part of it is to increase wages and benefits, and to use all the tools of government at all levels to push wages and benefits up. But part of it is also addressing what is the number one expense in people’s lives. So we have a plan to create 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years. So we can go right at the heart of the expense that is so challenging for so many working families. And we look at the totality of people’s lives.

And we know for so many families, the question of their children’s education is paramount, as it should be. I feel it as a New York City public school parent myself. We think so fundamentally about everything we need to do to get our children ready for the future. But that also comes with a whole host of challenges. And so many things that cost parents money out of their pocket or make it harder for their schedules to align to the work schedules of today. And so we decided we need to give more guarantees to the parents of this city. And so now, because of legislation we were able to get passed in Albany, every child in New York City – within the next two years – every child in New York City will have full-day pre-K guaranteed to them. Guaranteed.

[Applause]

And every middle school child will have the opportunity for after-school programs if they choose them. Because after-school also helps parents so profoundly. After-school helps children learn. After-school helps working parents with their schedule and to know their children are safe and sound. After-school is a great tool in support of law enforcement, because kids who have good options choose a positive path. These are the kinds of changes we can make. They’re available to us. Sometimes if they’re not going to happen as they should with the kind of support we deserve from the federal level, we at the local level, we at the state level need to find a way to make them happen because this is how we create coherence for working families. This is how we create the kind of support they deserve.

And I’ll finish with the point that in everything we do, there’s an opportunity to better people’s lives economically, to try and reach people who have not had as many economic advantages, try and reach families that are living closer to the edge. We know in all of the things we’re going to do to make this city sustainable for the future, all the things we have to do to make this a resilient city in light of climate change, and all the things we have to do to build back from the tragedy of Sandy. We know there’s opportunity in all of that work to help working families, to get job opportunities to people who haven’t had them. To see every tool as at our disposal to help people in need. I often say, if you believe in environmental sustainability, if you believe in resiliency, you should equally see it as a tool for economic sustainability for so many families that are struggling. And find very specific ways to knit those strategies together and reach working families who haven’t had opportunity.

I’ll end with a quote that was offered in a speech right here in New York City at Riverside Church by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He said, ‘A true revolution of values should soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.’ That simple notion that our values don’t allow us to see this ever-widening gulf and feel comfortable with it, that our values pull us towards fairness and equality and pull us towards using all the tools we have to open doors for so many people who’ve been left out, so many people who are struggling today in a way they would have thought unimaginable a few decades ago.

Our time is a time to take Dr. King’s concept and put it into action. We’re starting to do it here in New York City, and we look forward to partnering with so many of you in this room to continue this work and to find ways at each of our levels around the country to deepen our efforts to give people a real chance in this economy. Thank you.