Emily Stover DeRocco Speech

Emerging Technologies in Support of the New Freedom Initiative
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Washington, DC

Thank you Director Tingus. It is an incredible honor to be here this morning.

I am struck by the appropriate co-sponsors of this conference-the Department of Veterans Affairs and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy-with their respective missions of serving veterans, including those with disabilities, and promoting emerging technologies that expand opportunities for those with disabilities. Our veterans' tireless efforts around the world secure our Freedom and bring Freedom to many formerly oppressed and emerging technologies offer economic Freedom for so many challenged with disabilities. So, we appropriately gather together today in support of the President's aptly-named New Freedom Initiative. This nation was founded, built, and preserved thanks to the strength and courage of the men and women in uniform. Some are now home hoping to continue the American dream, representing the civilian workforces with new disabilities-that create new challenges for them

But now is an excellent time for all Americans because opportunities abound. Just last week, my Department announced that our economy has created over 2 million jobs in just 13 months. Every sector of the economy is participating in this hiring. Even manufacturing has added jobs this year, emerging from an extended and painful transformation as a leaner, stronger industry.

And those 2 million jobs are only the beginning. The experts are predicting that by 2012, there will be 21 million more jobs.

How is our nation going to add this many jobs in our hyper-competitive global economy? Through innovation. For more than one hundred years, innovation has been the key to our economic success.

From Thomas Edison and Henry Ford at the turn of the last century to laptops and global positioning systems at the turn of this century, the innovative spirit of the American people has been the engine of the global economy.

This innovative spirit is also leading to many miraculous technologies that are transforming our workplace and our workforce. As you heard in many of the sessions yesterday, amazing advances are now allowing even the most severely disabled the opportunity to participate and succeed in this new economy.

And let me tell you, we are going to need every available worker. I mentioned just a minute ago that there will be 21 million new jobs by 2012. Well, the same experts also predict that there will be only 17 million new workers to fill those jobs.

Four million unfilled jobs is a scary scenario for our economy. To bridge that gap, we must access the untapped labor potential available to us.

In the 1950s and 60s a similar dilemma faced our economy and millions of women answered the challenge, opening economic success to an entire segment of the population that had known very little and powering our post-war economy to great heights.

Now, with women representing over 45% of the workforce, we must look elsewhere. And where we can find these workers is in the millions of Americans living with disabilities who have previously found few options in the labor force.

But even though the opportunity exists, the challenge of actually training for and finding a job can still be daunting. Fortunately, there is a system out there that can help.

My Department administers our nation's One Stop Career Center system, the cornerstone of the public workforce investment system. Through this system, 17 federal programs funded at over $15 billion annually are connected in a network of over 3,500 One Stop Career Centers.

For the past half-dozen years, these One Stops and the public workforce system they represent have been evolving from the old unemployment offices to community-based job resource centers. Today, President Bush is working to make them so much more.

Over the past year, the Department of Labor has been leading this system by example, implementing the President's High Growth Job Training Initiative.

First, we focused on industries as diverse as our nation's economy, covering booming traditional areas such as health care and construction, transforming industries like advanced manufacturing and aerospace, and emerging futuristic ones like biotechnology and geospatial technology.

Then we conducted dozens of executive and human resource forums and received valuable information on workforce issues and challenges facing each of these industries. Then we developed solutions to those issues and challenges.

Something interesting happened over the course of these meetings. It became clear that although each individual industry has its own specific set of challenges, themes such as image, recruitment, retention, and educational capacity seem to emerge in every industry.

It came as less of a surprise then, that as we started developing solutions to these challenges, they too had similar themes across industries like expanding the pipeline of young workers, developing standardized curriculum and competency models, and identifying and accessing untapped pools of workers.