Mr. BENJAMIN. Can you break that down further and give us the projection of what we are looking at in the next several years if this trend continues? Mr. BOYLE. Yes, sir. We have a target, just in the composition area alone, to reduce the number of printers on our rolls. Mr. SAYLOR. I have a table here projected through 1985. Mr. BOYLE. For 1980 we have projected 3,601 people to be on our rolls in the production area. That is compared to 3,766 that are presently on our rolls in production. This will decrease, 1981, 3,538; 1982, 3,524; 1983, 3,483; 1984, 3,445; so we are talking about nearly 200 fewer people just in the production area. PAY SCALES FOR PRINTERS Mr. BENJAMIN. What does a printer get paid? Mr. BOYLE. The hourly rate of a printer, a typesetter, and they all get the same basic rate of pay, the basic journeyman hourly rate is $11.38. Mr. BENJAMIN. What is that annualized to? Mr. BOYLE. $23,670. Mr. BENJAMIN. What if you were a printer there for 15 years, what would that come to? Mr. BOYLE. If you were a printer for 15 years? It doesn't make any difference. There are no longevity increases. We have negotiated agreements on wage scales, and each craft employee gets an hourly rate of pay no matter how many years he has worked. Mr. BENJAMIN. Are there other crafts that would annualize to more than $24,000? Mr. BOYLE. Yes, sir. I believe our highest craft pay now would be offset photographers. Mr. BENJAMIN. What is that? Mr. SAYLOR. Twelve dollars and some change, sir. Mr. BENJAMIN. Annual salary? Mr. BOYLE. Multiply that by 2,080 hours, about $25,000. Mr. BENJAMIN. You don't have anything approaching $33,000 or $34,000? Mr. BOYLE. I think I know what the chairman is asking. PAY SCALES OF NIGHT EMPLOYEES Mr. BOYLE. This is the base day pay. In addition to that, we have people that work on the night side, after 6 o'clock. About half of our production force works on the night side and they receive a 15percent night differential. So add 15 percent to the $25,000. Mr. BENJAMIN. You are up to nearly $30,000 now. ADDITIONAL PAY FOR OVERTIME Mr. BOYLE. In addition to that, many of our people on the night side in the composing area pick up another $6,000 to $8,000 in overtime. Our people last year worked 2 hours overtime nearly every night while Congress was in session; 2 hours every night and almost every Saturday. In one period we worked our people for 28 straight days without a day off, 10 hours a day. Many of them grossed $33,000 to $35,000. Mr. BENJAMIN. That is for overtime for what period to get up to your $33,000 to $35,000? Mr. BOYLE. Overtime for what period to get up to $33,000? Overtime at the night rate would be $11.38 an hour plus 15 percent plus 50 percent. I would say 400 hours of overtime will be $7,000 or $8,000 more at the night rate. Some people work overtime as much as 20 hours a week. They work 40 hours and get 20 hours overtime. The 20 hours overtime equals 30 hours of straight time, so it is possible to receive as much as 70 hours pay in one week. Mr. BENJAMIN. You are talking about all these adding up to somewhere around $33,000 to $35,000. That is if you work overtime. Mr. BOYLE. If you work overtime on the night side. Some of our people don't work all of the overtime, so it isn't everybody. However, it is a great majority of the people, because there are times, particularly when Congress is in session and, in the rush to get all of the appropriation bills reported out by the deadline we get hit with a workload that is unbelievable. Mr. BENJAMIN. What I am getting at is this is your highest pay working nights, when the Congress is in session, and working overtime. WEEKLY WAGE OF EMPLOYEES Mr. BOYLE. And working overtime, yes. To look at the wages in GPO fairly you have to look at them on the basis of what is the basic hourly rate, if you are going to compare it with private industry. In fact, you have to look at it more than that. You should look at what is the weekly wage, because our people work 40 hours a week when the prevailing number of hours in the commercial printing industry is now down to 30 to 35. Our people work longer hours to get that take-home pay. RETRAINING OF EMPLOYEES Mr. BENJAMIN. In your statement you mention that the "GPO is making every effort to deal with the human problems stemming from the impact of new technology. To insure that positions created by new technology are made available to the current workforce, we instituted a cross-training program and stopped hiring journeymen from the outside. How many employees have you retrained under the program since January 1, 1978? What costs are involved in conducting the training program? Mr. BOYLE. I would have to furnish the exact numbers for the record, Mr. Chairman. Mr. BENJAMIN. I would appreciate that, and I would also appreciate you advising us of any that have left after being retrained. Mr. BOYLE. Yes, sir. [The information follows:] COST OF RETRAINING EMPLOYEES DUE TO NEW KEYBOARDING TECHNOLOGY GPO has retrained a total of 83 out of the 104 who entered the retraining program. The remaining 21 employees were reassigned to their former positions. While there was no additional expense for this program, it is estimated the GPO lost approximately $300,000 in productive time while these employees were being trained. However, this training would have been required for any journeyman because there is no available source of craftsmen competent on the type of equipment presently being used. In addition employees and unions have used their own resources for retraining purposes. Mr. BENJAMIN. At this time I would like to yield to Mr. Rudd. JUSTIFICATION FOR PROOFREADING Mr. RUDD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Boyle, I know that you, along with everybody else, have a lot of problems in waste and what-have-you, but I have one example here that I would like to just discuss with you for a moment. It is a 55-page publication by the Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, entitled "Chartbook on Prices and Wages." By the way, you mentioned proofreading a little earlier. What do you proofread for, not for substance, but for just typos and that sort of thing? Mr. BOYLE. Not for substance. We do not do any editorial proofreading. A proofreader reads to make sure that the printed product that we are going to print is exactly the same as the copy that was submitted. In the case of a lot of congressional work which is moving through the Hill here just as fast as it is moving through GPO, our people do attempt to correct obvious errors in spelling, obvious errors in capitalization, and make it conform to the GPO Style Manual, and at times will correct a Member's punctuation, if we know that it is wrong. However, it is possible that in correcting it we may change the meaning so we try to just correct the typographical errors and make the printed product conform with the proof. REPRINT FOR BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS Mr. RUDD. This example here is an error that could have been avoided. This is a 55-page booklet by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The correct copy shows it was a publication of December 1978. The original printing of it was December 1979, and when the error was discovered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they insisted that you reprint this entire 55-page booklet because of that one error, which could have been corrected by a paste-on to correct the date from 1979 to 1978. This would have saved you a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of expense to the taxpayers. I know there must be a number of other examples like this. But the reason I bring it up is because I think it is something that could be remedied, and maybe should be by the Congress. I raise the example because I think that you must encounter this frequently. Maybe you don't, and I know that you will tell me if you don't. It could have been very easily handled if the people who requested this work had been willing to pay a little more attention to proofreading. I wonder how often this does occur. Mr. BOYLE. There are several facets to that problem. I am not familiar with this particular publication. If it was camera copy, furnished by the agency, and I can't say whether it was, but I say, if it was camera copy furnished by the agency, it would have been shot and printed either in GPO or under contract with one of our commercial printers, which I believe it was. The question on the date would never have been discovered by anybody in GPO or by the contractor, and it was just shot as it was furnished to us. Mr. RUDD. I am told by your people that this was the way it was submitted, and it was not your fault. Mr. BOYLE. The agency gave us the copy and we shot it and that is how it was delivered. Mr. RUDD. And they insisted on a reprint of the entire thing. Mr. BOYLE. At their expense. Mr. RUDD. Regardless of the expense. Mr. BOYLE. At the government's expense. Now if this had been a contractor error and our contractor had made a mistake, we would have forced the contractor to print it at his expense. If the error had been made in the GPO, and the error was determined by the agency to be unacceptable, the decision of whether to print or not to print over at our expense is a decision of the Public Printer. There are times we print publications that have errors, or the agency has submitted copy with errors, that I take a personal interest in. I have delegated responsibility to my people to determine whether we will reprint at government expense, and the agency appeal is to the Public Printer and then to the Joint Committee on Printing. I don't think we need changes in the law. I think the law is strong enough now to say that unless-well, let me go back a minute. We say that the date could be fixed by some simple thing like pasting over it. When you have a long run job running on high speed presses, sometimes the labor involved in making a manual correction far exceeds the cost of printing it over, so we have to take all of the costs into consideration. We look at every single one, because every time an agency brings a job back and demands that it be printed over for some reason, if it is any sizable amount of money it comes to my attention and I make the decision as to whether it should be printed over or is a usable product. Mr. RUDD. Regardless of whose expense. Mr. BOYLE. Regardless of whose expense. But I don't have strong grounds to stand on when the agency demands and they say, look, it is our money we are spending and we want to get a better product. Mr. RUDD. Let's take this example. You have printed a 55-page booklet with this cover. The only error is on the cover, a change from 1979 to 1978. Now is there any way to change that without printing the entire 55-page booklet, basing the expense that you have in mind? ALTERNATE CORRECTION METHODS Mr. BOYLE. Well, there is a possibility. You could black out the 1978 and stamp 1979, but now you are back to a manual process of putting them through a slow printing process to overprint a new date. Mr. RUDD. So it would be cheaper to print the entire 55 pages over Mr. BOYLE. It could be. Yes, sir. Mr. RUDD [continuing]. Than it would be to just- because there is no available source of craftsmen competent on the type of equipment presently being used. In addition employees and unions have used their own resources for retraining purposes. Mr. BENJAMIN. At this time I would like to yield to Mr. Rudd. JUSTIFICATION FOR PROOFREADING Mr. RUDD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Boyle, I know that you, along with everybody else, have a lot of problems in waste and what-have-you, but I have one example here that I would like to just discuss with you for a moment. It is a 55-page publication by the Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, entitled "Chartbook on Prices and Wages." By the way, you mentioned proofreading a little earlier. What do you proofread for, not for substance, but for just typos and that sort of thing? Mr. BOYLE. Not for substance. We do not do any editorial proofreading. A proofreader reads to make sure that the printed product that we are going to print is exactly the same as the copy that was submitted. In the case of a lot of congressional work which is moving through the Hill here just as fast as it is moving through GPO, our people do attempt to correct obvious errors in spelling, obvious errors in capitalization, and make it conform to the GPO Style Manual, and at times will correct a Member's punctuation, if we know that it is wrong. However, it is possible that in correcting it we may change the meaning so we try to just correct the typographical errors and make the printed product conform with the proof. REPRINT FOR BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS Mr. RUDD. This example here is an error that could have been avoided. This is a 55-page booklet by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The correct copy shows it was a publication of December 1978. The original printing of it was December 1979, and when the error was discovered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they insisted that you reprint this entire 55-page booklet because of that one error, which could have been corrected by a paste-on to correct the date from 1979 to 1978. This would have saved you a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of expense to the taxpayers. I know there must be a number of other examples like this. But the reason I bring it up is because I think it is something that could be remedied, and maybe should be by the Congress. I raise the example because I think that you must encounter this frequently. Maybe you don't, and I know that you will tell me if you don't. It could have been very easily handled if the people who requested this work had been willing to pay a little more attention to proofreading. I wonder how often this does occur. Mr. BOYLE. There are several facets to that problem. I am not familiar with this particular publication. If it was camera copy, furnished by the agency, and I can't say whether it was, but I say, if it was camera copy furnished by the agency, it would have been shot and printed either in GPO or under contract with one of our commercial printers, which I believe it was. The question on the |