Speeches by Secretary Elaine L. Chao

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Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao
Women in Government Relations
Luncheon, January 29, 2002

Thank you, Kelly, and thank you all so much for inviting me here today.

What an impressive crowd! It was such a pleasure to spend some time over lunch with the WGR leadership – Serena Lowe, LaVerne Alexander and Phyllis Hughes. You are all great role models for the membership of this group – all of you are at the top of your game and serve as an inspiration to Washington’s professional women.

To the members of Women in Government Relations: I commend you all. You belong to this group because you want to achieve your full potential, professionally and personally. You’ve chosen a rather tough town to do it in, and I admire your ambition.

Indeed, our nation’s capital is a competitive town. I don’t need to tell you that, do I? But I’m also happy to report that women in Washington wield more power and influence than ever before.

We really have come such a long way. I think particularly of the path blazed by one of my mentors, Elizabeth Dole.

Elizabeth taught me that I’d have to work twice as hard as my male colleagues to achieve my dreams… and as I look back, I know that the path she and her generation cut was already helping women my age, and has helped many of you.

So now we are approaching a day when statistics about women in the workforce will be irrelevant – because we will no longer be considered a minority there, even at the highest levels. We’re not there yet, but we will be soon.

Did the guys get a head start on us? Yes. Are we still playing catch-up? Yes. But before you know it, we will be running neck-and-neck.

You’ll have to excuse me for the horseracing terminology. It’s one of those Kentucky habits I’ve picked up.

At any rate, statistics about working women, and women in Washington, are still collected and analyzed, so I’ll share with you my current favorites.

To start with, please permit me to brag. I am the first Cabinet secretary to have half of my presidential appointments (9 out of 18) filled by women. This is an all-time high.

Many of you have worked with some of these accomplished women: Kris Iverson heads our office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs. Emily DeRocco is the Assistant Secretary for the Employment and Training Administration – which, by the way, represents 92% of the Department of Labor’s total budget. Ann Combs is doing a fantastic job as the head of the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration. And Tammy McCutchen is our Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, Employment Standards Administration.

So both pension security and the vast majority of the Labor Department’s budget are in the hands of women… and even more talented women are in the DOL pipeline!

I certainly hope you all get a chance to get to know each of these outstanding women, and to work with them.

It’s nice to be the first to achieve something like this. But the best part of this achievement is that I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t set a quota when I became head of the Labor Department.

I simply sought out the best people for the jobs, and this is how it turned out.

I am also pleased to report that the Bush administration has a record number of women in leadership positions. The Washington Post’s Outlook section reported, on Sunday, that president Bush “has appointed more women to influential staff positions than has any other president.”

And again, I know that the president’s desire was to pick the best people for those jobs. He was blind to gender and race. He sought the best and brightest.

Some day, a balance of men and women at the highest levels of government and business will not be considered historic. It is good for public policy and it is good for business. And as long as there are women like you, it won’t be considered historic or special for long.

I have been asked to share with you “my path,” “my story” …

I find it amusing when young people ask me whether I actually planned to someday be a Cabinet member.

I can tell you one thing for sure: I did not plan this! I really believe, like Tom Hanks said in Castaway, that while ‘you never know what is going to wash ashore’ in life, it is so important to embrace whatever does.

My personal story all started with incredibly wonderful, hard-working parents. People who, although we really started out with nothing in this country, always reassured me that everything would be okay. After all, we had each other and we had the goodness and opportunities of this great country .

So I wanted nothing more in my younger years than to make my parents proud, show them gratitude and respect by doing well in school and succeeding in life.

Making enough money to have my own apartment seemed pretty important to me, too. After all, I spent my first few years in this country living in very tight quarters – me, my parents and my two sisters crowded into a one-bedroom apartment in New York City after we moved here from Taiwan.

My father emphasized the importance of education from the time my sisters and I were very young and just learning English. When we came home from school at night, we hit the books right off. There were no snacks or computer games for us!

And it paid off. All six of us went to college and later to graduate school. We took our academic lives seriously, thanks to the emphasis my father put on it.

My Washington career really began when I was chosen to be a White House Fellow.

I later became a member of the first Bush administration, first as Deputy Maritime Administrator, then Chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, and then as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Transportation.

Those were challenging days. While I was there, we dealt with the Pan Am 103 disaster and the 1989 San Francisco Earth Quake.

After that, I was ready to lead the Peace Corps as it established programs in several Baltic nations and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.

But a greater challenge still was my job as head of the United Way. This is where I got the bulk of my experience turning around troubled organizations.

I started there in 1992. The organization had just been through the darkest hour in its history. More than anything else, trust had been eroded, once the hallmark of the United Way.

At this stage of my career, I know that effective management requires knowing your business. There is no substitute for this.

[It is also, by the way, is something I had to tell some rather important gentlemen recently. You see, I had asked Ann Combs – our Assistant Secretary for Pension and Welfare Benefits – to look closely and carefully at retirement security as soon as we started at the Labor Department last year. So when I met recently with other cabinet members to talk about the issue, I was prepared. Others were not, and they said they “needed to get started.” I said, “boys, you’d better get to work!”]

You also need to know the people.

Because knowing your facts means you’ll never be caught off guard, intellectually. But you must know the people if you actually want to accomplish change.

And I’ve always wanted to accomplish change. I’ve never been a bench-warmer.

My job now, as the Secretary of Labor, is the best job I’ll ever have. I embrace my purpose: to enhance retirement security, to ensure healthy, safe workplaces and to promote the education and training necessary for the 21^st Century Workforce.

All of these objectives lead to the ultimate goal of keeping American workers safe, secure and trained. This is good for workers and it is good for business.

And of course my top priority right now is to get people back to work. America wants to work. And we’re giving dislocated workers the tools to find new jobs and provide for their families so that we can beat those rising unemployment numbers.

So the moral of my story, ladies, is this:

First, no one is going to serve it to you on a platter. You’ve got to go out and get it. Fight for it. Work for it.

Second, you’ve got to be flexible. Learn to adapt quickly. If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that circumstances change. They change suddenly, and they change big.

Third: always, always be true to yourself. That is how you are going to keep your integrity. And at the end of the day, that is the most important thing.

Thank you.

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