时隔多年，美国前总统克林顿重回白宫发表演讲，以纪念《家庭和医疗休假法》颁布30周年！（附视频&演讲稿）

Thank you, thank you very much.

Somewhere I'm supposed to have some notes here.

These are the president Biden notes. Why don't I just give your speech and you can give mine.

I found it.

Thank you, madam vice president, for that introduction and for your kind remarks about the work we did. I'm very grateful toll President Biden for many things but I thank him for asking me back to the White House to celebrate 30 years of the family and medical leave act . And, as you showed by your enthusiastic response to the vice president's remarks, what the family and medical leave act should tell us about our common future. The bill was the result of years of passionate advocacy and effort by so many people .

None more than my friend of more years than we'd like to admit, Chris Dodd .

So before I started running for president I was a governor but I was very interested in this issue.

Dodd introduces this bill every year .

And he introduced it for six years I think before it passed.

So he passed it. It got vetoed and then he passed it again and it got vetoed again.

By the time I started running for president I basically made it a part of my stump speech because I thought it both embodied what was wrong then by the polarized politics of Washington and embodied the hazards of overlooking the country when it changed on the ground.

What do I mean by that ? The president and I and Nancy and Chris and all of us who were, dare I say it, 75 or older, we grew up in a different time.

We grew up in a different time .

My mother always worked and my grandmother did, but they were a typical. By the time the 1992 election unfolded , there were more and more families where both the mother and the father had to work to make a living or where there was only one parent in the home with the children.

In a situation like that both the society and its political leaders are utterly hypocritical if they say oh, there's nothing more important than raising children.

Well, how about a little help to do it? Well, we can't do that. And so the rest of us followed the lead of senator Dodd and the others in the senate and there were republicans too that were for it.

That was a different time. There were more than 2 00 women's children, labor and faith organizations led by the partnership for women and families.

If you ever feel drifting, just ask what you should do .

She will tell you. There were all these people in the business community who were progressives.

They implemented their own forms of family leave because they realized it was good for moral , for the long-term health of the business . Still it took eight years, two vetoes and another election before it became law.

But today one of the most important things we can do is to remember that the family leave act and every other thing that is really fundamentally changed this country that moved through congress is an embodiment of what I learned from the World War I es essay. The great German sociologist who said politics was the long and slow boaring of hard boards. All these people bored the hard boards and we are the beneficiaries and we should all be grateful.

I kept saying that all the time when people wondered why when the president took office we didn't have infrastructure bill , the chips act, the inflation, anti-inflation act and all the climate change stuff in 15 minutes.

And one of the reasons I was so happy when he got elected president is a watched him spend 15 years, if that's what it took, to make the changes that we needed to make this country a better place to live . So I think we should remember that . I also think you should know , Chris Dodd will say the same thing, after all these years, I still have more people mention the family leave act to me than any other specific things I do. And no one ever talks about what gets all the press coverage, you know, the political process , how long did it take, who got railed, what went up. They tell you their story.

That's when you know that we have united the country.

Then my job is to introduce a story teller .

So I will tell you my story and the point of her story.

First time I ever got on an airplane after I left the oval office, boy, what a bummer.

When do you really know you're not president anymore? They don't play a song when you walk in a room and you're back on commercial air travel.

So I'm tracking the shuttle from New York to Washington and this really compelling flight attendant with a very intense stare looked at me and said may I talk to you? I said sure. She said my husband loves you.

He's a jazz musician and he teaches music in school so he was always for you, but I didn't care about you one way or the other until the family medical leave act.

I have a sister and we had the misfortune that both our parents were dying at once, one with cancer, one with advanced Alzheimer's. There's no way we could support them with care except because of the family and medical leave act, and I just wanted to tell you this.

I heard all these politicians give speeches about family values. She said I know how your families, how your parents die is an important family value .

It was breath taking. I never get on a shuttle after 20 years that I don't think about that woman.

And then in one other story , on an early Sunday morning I took a 1:00 out of the White House .

I came back. I needed to go out and shower and dress and Hillary and I were going to church.

I got there and there was a young person at the White House giving a tour to a man and his daughter.

She was obviously very ill . And I said, would you excuse me because I'd really like to welcome you properly but I need to go clean up and get dressed and I had her taken to the oval office. So I went up, took a shower, came down, went into the oval office , you know, gave a little standard two or three sentence to her and took a picture and then I was walking back out on to the south lawn and when the daughter walked out with the dad, he grabbed me by the ello and I turned around.

He had big tears in his eyes. He said, you know, my little girl is not going to make it much longer, but he said because of the family and medical leave act these months I have spent with her are by far the most important time of my life. And he said I am telling you this because I read all the stuff, I know what all the controversies are. He said it is so easy for you up here to forget that what you do affects the lives of other people in ways you cannot imagine.

I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been able to share this time with my daughter.

Now we're here first to celebrate the fact that now about 400 million times in the last 30 years Americans have taken advantage of the family and medical leave act.

We're here because in spite of that and in spite of the 2020 study that the Department of Labor did finding that 95% of employers said that the family and medical leave act either didn't hurt or actually helped productivity, reduced turnover and increased morale.

There's still a lot of problems that can't be solved without some form of paid leave.

In fact, we tried to at least get permission to use surplus unemployment insurance funds by state in the late '90s and there was a lot of opposition to that.

People acted like once again the free enterprise system would collapse. We actually gave people a chance to take care of their sick relatives or be there when a baby was born or when it was some other terrible problem .

So we need more stories, not process, stories.

People need to understand that as great as this was , there's still a lot of people left out . There's the real purpose of today . So one of the stories you haven't heard is Natasha Jackson Jackson's, and she's a pretty good story teller, so I ask you to welcome her to the stage .

--- thank you president Clinton and Vice-President Harris.

I'm here today with my husband Josh .

I'm honored to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the family and medical leave act as well as recent wins including the pregnant workers' fairness act.

Which President Biden, thank you , signed into law over a month ago. This victory is personal to me and I'm going to try not to tear up.

When I was three months pregnant and the only woman working at a local rental furniture company, I asked my employer to let me do less heavy lifting.

I thought it would be an easy yes.

Instead, I lost my job. I was our primary bread winner at the time. We just made a downpayment on a house, but without my income we had to back out of all of it.

We then ended up homeless and needing emergency public housing all in a matter of months.

What fellow moms including ARMARANDa and Lindsey, we're here today . So what happened to us would never happen to anyone else we created the fairness to pregnant workers' act. I am so grateful my nieces and millions of other workers won't have to choose between starting a family and keeping their jobs, and I'm grateful that President Biden keeps fighting for us, for workers, for families, our economic security and for people like me.

So with that being said, I am honored to introduce president Joe Biden .