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(Witnesses: Hill, Zappone.)

Mr. ZAPPONE. It is, sir. Oftentimes, when a bureau inadvertently endeavors to issue instructions or forms that overlap the work of another bureau or division the Chief of the Publications Division will bring it to the attention of the bureaus concerned, so that they may be apprised of the matter before it has gone any further, and take it up and discuss it with a view of preventing any duplication of work. I think that is one of your duties; is it not, Mr. Hill?

Mr. HILL. That is one of the things that, as departmental editor, devolve upon me exclusively, I think. For instance, a man gets up a blank in which he discusses methods or gives instructions in regard to the methods of preparing accounts. I would send that in to Mr. Zappone and see whether it squared with the fiscal regulations of the Department.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Your censorship applies to articles which are published without remuneration as well as to those which are published for remuneration?

Mr. HILL. Entirely; yes, sir.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Does it apply in the case of delivering lectures? Are the lecturers supposed to outline what they are going to talk about?

Mr. HILL. They are supposed to. I do not know how far that goes, but I think every chief would expect his subordinate to give him a chance to look over his paper before he went outside to read it. I think it is generally done. I could not speak for that in other divisions. I know I would certainly expect it. If one of my men went out to give a talk upon the publication work of the Department of Agriculture, I am quite sure that he would bring me the paper that he had prepared before he read it.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. You have no work outside of Washington, have you?

Mr. HILL. No work outside of Washington; no, sir. Once in a while I have sent the chief of the illustration work to investigate some new process of illustration which it was thought might possibly be made available with economy in our work. I think he has made two trips of that kind in the course of the last five years at a probable total expense of $60 or $70. But we have practically, I may say, nothing outside of Washington.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Are all of the clerks in your division fully employed?

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Mr. HILI. Very fully, sir; to the full extent of their capacity. think I may say with some gratification, as an evidence of improvement in the character of the personnel and in the assiduity with which the great majority of my people attend to their work, that we have increased the work of the division every year from 10 to 20 per cent, with an increase of the expenses running from 3 to 5 per cent.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. With what increase in the personnel of the force?

Mr. HILL. The increase in the expense would be very much in the same proportion as the increase in the force.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. How do you make promotions?

Mr. HILL. Of course you mean to ask how I start to get a promotion. I do not make any, of course. I have no promotive power.

(Witnesses: Hill, Zappone.)

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Your recommendations are to the Secretary, I suppose?

Mr. HILL. But I make the recommendations for promotions, when a vacancy occurs in a grade, after consultation with the chief of that line of work. (I can not call them, for convenience, anything but chiefs, though they are not chiefs.) Taking that into account, and also the efficiency reports for the last year or two, it generally resolves itself into a question of two or three people. For instance, we will say an $840 vacancy occurs. I will go over the $720 people who are eligible for promotion under the laws of the classified service; and as a result of consultation with those who have direct charge of the work of those people, and the efficiency reports, we will get down to perhaps two or three.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. How do you reach that conclusion?

Mr. HILL. By consultation with the gentlemen who have charge of their work, and by reference to the efficiency reports. For instance, if a man's efficiency report does not aggregate 85 out of the total of 100, he is thrown out at once.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Are your efficiency reports arrived at by the same method as in the other bureaus?

Mr. HILL. I suppose so, though I hardly know about that.. I do not know exactly what system they follow. I have never discussed that with them.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Is there not an established rule as to securing those efficiency reports in the Department?

Mr. HILL. I do not think there is. At least I have always used my own judgment in filling up an efficiency report.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Does the same efficiency procedure that obtains in the other bureaus obtain in your Bureau?

Mr. HILL. I think so; yes, sir. I think so.

Mr. ZAPPONE. So far as the efficiency blanks themselves are concerned, they are all made out uniformly, and made out under instructions from the Secretary.

Mr. HILL. From the Secretary; we make them out every six months.

Mr. ZAPPONE. And those questions are passed on by the general Department board on promotions, consisting of the chief clerk, the appointment clerk, and the chief of the bureau or division in which the vacancy occurs.

Mr. HILL. Exactly. The chief clerk has to coincide in my recommendation, and the appointment clerk has to certify that the appointment is one which is legal and in accordance with the regulations of the classified service.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Have those clerks access to the efficiency reports?

Mr. HILL. Well, I do not keep them, you understand; I turn them over as soon as I make them; but I should not hesitate to show any of my clerks (although they are called "confidential ") his own or her own report. I would not show them the reports made on anybody else, because the instructions that I have received are that these ratings are confidential. But as I do not keep them, you know, it would only be possible for such a request to be made and

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(Witness: Hill.)

granted during the short time that I have them while I am filling them out.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Have you had occasion during the last year to make reductions on account of those efficiency reports?

Mr. HILL. I have secured two reductions, and once in a while there has been a suspension of pay for a time; but these cases are very rare. The ACTING CHAIRMAN. You receive your appointees from the Civil Service Commission, do you?

Mr. HILL. All my people come in now through the Civil Service Commission.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Have you any employed that did not come in in that way?

Mr. HILL. We have a few of the old ones who came in before they were covered in. There is now none in my establishment that is not within the limits of the classified service; and nearly all my responsible persons, with very few exceptions, came into the classified service, through being examined.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Do you know whether or not there is much of a waiting list?

Mr. HILL. I imagine that there is, clerically; but judging by the difficulty we have in filling places for skilled laborers and messengers, especially messenger boys, I judge that there can not be a very full waiting list, unless it be that the apportionment interferes. The State apportionment law, covering the apportionment to States, may possibly be one cause of that difficulty.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Do you find the State apportionment embarrassing to the service?

Mr. HILL. Very embarrassing as regards the minor places. In the case of messenger boys at $30 to $35 a month, and laborers at $10 to $50, it is an awful nuisance.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Does that apportionment apply to the higher salaries, too?

Mr. HILL. Oh, yes. The Commission occasionally waive it, I believe, in the case of some people who are experts; if they have a restricted, a very small waiting list, I believe they sometimes waive it. The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Will you kindly differentiate between the different grades of your employees, starting with the $600 clerks and going up?

Mr. HILL. Below that figure we have comparatively few except messenger boys. Beginning with $600 we have messengers, who, I ought to say, do a great deal of work besides messenger work. The messenger boy in my illustration section gets less than $600, but he is doing a great deal of work in assisting the photographer. He has developed a capacity for work in that line. He does all of my blueprint work, or a great deal of it, under supervision, of course. that is by the way.

But

It would seem that we have a great many messengers. We have to have a good many, but at the same time it would be a mistake to suppose that these messengers do nothing but sit in a chair until somebody rings the bell to send them on an errand. They are at work all the time, or almost all the time, doing something-filing letters and doing simple work. In other words, they are office boys, making themselves generally useful as well as for errands.

(Witness: Hill.)

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. With a view of promotion?

Mr. HILL. With a view of promotion, because after they have been there two years they can take a clerical examination without competition. Some of them have done so. We lost one of our best messenger boys last month. He went into one of the other divisions as a clerk, having passed the clerical examination.

Then we have both clerks and skilled laborers, at $600 and $720. The ACTING CHAIRMAN. What do you mean by a "skilled laborer? "Skilled in any particular form of labor?

Mr. HILL. Skilled laborers are simply laborers who are called "skilled" because, in the classified service, any labor that involves a knowledge of reading and writing is called "skilled." They are not specially expert, though some of them become very expert as folders. They do the folding and the mailing. I have a force of men for the heavy work, and a force of women for the Farmers' Bulletins. My principal foreman has a force of, I suppose, eighteen or twenty men or twenty-two men-something like that; about a score of men. He does the miscellaneous distribution and the heavy work, like the wrapping of the yearbooks and the annual reports and things of that kind, which require strong wrapping.

Then the clerical work; the largest number of clerks attending to any one particular thing are those who are addressing envelopes, addressing wrappers, and addressing labels all the time. We have a room full of those probably thirty women-who devote almost their entire time, except when an emergency calls for some folding, to writing addresses. Then we have a considerable number of clerks who receive the mail. The mail reaches them for distribution, and they make out orders, which orders go to either the Farmers' Bulletin folding room or the miscellaneous folding room to be filled. We receive requests for publications at the rate of probably 1,500 a day, involving considerably more than one application for one publication apiece. A very large amount of clerical work is required to dispose of those requests.

Then we have bookkeepers. We have our regular bookkeeper in my division, who keeps the financial accounts, and we have a bookkeeper who keeps an account of the publications. The total edition of every publication, as it is received, is charged to us and credited with the scheme of distribution as its various parts are filled, so that the bookkeeper's books will show approximately the number that we have on hand of each publication.

Then we have the bookkeeper who keeps the accounts of the Members of Congress for Farmers' Bulletins. Each Member of Congress is credited in the ledger account with the quota decided upon for that year, and he is charged with those that he orders out. We have a very competent woman who keeps those accounts with the Members of Congress. We have had very little trouble, I am glad to say, with that. There is very seldom a discrepancy, and in almost every case where there has been a discrepancy we have come out on top.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. How many of those Farmers' Bulletins are assigned to each Congressman?

Mr. HILL. Ten thousand, this year. The most ever assigned to them was 15,000.

(Witnesses: Hill, Zappone.)

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Do those left over from a previous year continue to the credit of the Congressmen?

Mr. HILL. No; they revert to the Department, but the Secretary has always instructed me to put them into the pot for the next year. The reason the number is so low this year is because gradually, during the last two years, there have been fewer and fewer turned over from one year to the other, and last year there was practically nonenone worth mentioning.

What I have said will pretty well cover the work of the clerks and skilled laborers from $600 up to $900 and $1,000. We have very few that get $1,200.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. I notice that last year you had one stenographer for one month. Do you not have a stenographer all the time? Mr. HILL. Yes; we have two or three stenographers all the time. We have one stenographer that gets $1,200 and we have another stenographer that gets $1,000, but we are frequently obliged to call for extra help in correspondence.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. They are not styled stenographers in your report, are they?

Mr. HILL. No; they are just clerks of class 1 and a clerk at $1,000. Mr. ZAPPONE. That is strictly in accordance with the wording of the law.

Mr. HILL. There is one thing that bothers me a good deal in this statutory roll, and that is the crystallization of people under a name. For instance, I have a photographer. I might have a vacancy in the artist's room for a draftsman and artist or a clerk or draftsman that he would deserve to get, and yet I could not give it to him because he is styled a photographer. And so with the skilled laborers. I get skilled laborers who can do clerical work, but I can not give them clerical pay, because they are appropriated for as skilled laborers, and the only vacancy is that of a clerk. I think that in some of the bureaus, Mr. Zappone, that has been changed somewhat. In the Secretary's roll I think I noticed that it is "clerk or skilled laborer "so many clerks or skilled laborers, at so much.

Mr. ZAPPONE. That has been done in one or two of the bureaus, and it is with the end in view of being able to assign them to either work. Mr. HILL. It is a great convenience, where the statutory roll confines you, ties you, and binds you as it does, to have a certain latitude in your designation.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Then the designation in your report does not always indicate the character of work being performed by that person?

Mr. HILL. No, sir. In a general way the clerks do clerical work and the messengers do messenger work, but they are all apt to do other things besides.

Mr. ZAPPONE. For instance, Mr. Chairman, in my division I have a statutory place called "Custodian of files and records." I have to keep that man strictly on that work.

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. Your stenographers are engage in taking dictation?

Mr. HILL. Two of them are all the time, and quite frequently a third, and every once in a while we have had to fill a place temporarily, and the temporary clerk that has accepted the place has

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