Clinton Signs Bill Creating Jobless Voucher Program

Out-of-work Americans will be able to get vouchers to buy their own job-training services under a bill that President Clinton signed Friday.

“Almost every American has more than enough sense to decide what is in his or her best interests given a little helpful advice on the available alternatives,” Clinton said before signing the Workforce Investment Act.

The Rose Garden ceremony, attended by several Republican lawmakers who have sparred bitterly with Clinton over education policy, marked a political cease-fire in this election season.

“It is a model of what we should be doing--and also, the way we did it is a model of how our government ought to work,” Clinton said of the job-training legislation. “It was a truly bipartisan, American effort.”

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), the bill’s primary House sponsor, likened it to the 1996 welfare overhaul. The new act “streamlines federal bureaucracy and returns programs to the states and communities, which are better equipped to serve individuals than some federal bureaucrat in Washington,” McKeon said at the signing ceremony.

Primarily, the new law consolidates a tangle of about 60 federal job programs into three block grants to the states, transferring funds and decision-making authority from Washington agencies to state and local communities. Individuals will receive vouchers they can use to select and pay for skills-training services.

The measure also expands a program of 800 model, one-stop career centers “so people don’t have to trot around to one different agency after another” when they find themselves out of work, Clinton said.

Under the new law, each local area will be required to have at least one such center that combines training, employment services, unemployment insurance, vocational rehabilitation, adult education and other programs in one “street level” location.

“What all this amounts to is that we get to celebrate Labor Day a month early this year,” Clinton said.

Earlier Friday, Clinton signed without fanfare the Credit Union Membership Access Act, even though it lacked a provision requiring credit unions to abide by rules that now require banks to serve poor and minority communities.

The legislation gives credit unions a boost in competing with smaller community banks for customers. It overrides a recent Supreme Court ruling that allows federally chartered credit unions to accept members from more than one occupational group as long as each group does not exceed 3,000 people.

The legislation also tightens rules governing credit unions’ cash reserves and other internal controls.