It is equally interesting and revealing to contrast the percentages of the Anglo and Spanish-speaking families earning $10,000 or more. Among the general population of the Southwest, 17.6 percent of the total number of families have incomes of $10,000 or more, as compared with 6.6 percent of the Spanish-speaking families.

In certain counties, the poverty is even more prevalent. For example, in Mora County, N. Mex., where the population is 85.4 percent Spanish-speaking, the percentage of poor families in 1966 was 67.1 percent. In Los Alamos County, N. Mex., where the population is only 11.2 percent Spanish-speaking, there were only 2.1 percent of the families living in poverty in 1966.

The labor movement is an instrument for combating poverty through the exercise of its right to bargain collectively for workers. But, it proves to be an effective instrument only because its members are already gainfully employed. It uses economic pressure to seek a better share of the wealth of the Nation.

However, when its members are unemployed collective bargaining has little influence. Under that circumstance, the labor movement must apply political pressure to encourage the application of the fiscal and monetary powers of the Government.

I make this comment because we are all conditioned to accept and, surely, to expect Government intervention when there is a massive unemployment.

The Federal Government must enlist the cooperation of citizens at all walks of life and of private industry to assure that meaningful productive work is available to everyone willing and able to work.

To create socially useful jobs, the program should concentrate on huge backlog of employment needs in parks, streets, slums, countryside, schools, colleges, libraries and hospitals

And many others.

The program must provide meaningful jobs, not dead end, not make work projects.

Basic education, training and counseling must be an integral part of the program. Funds for training education and counseling should be made available to private industry as well as to public and private nonprofit agencies.

Such a program should seek to qualify new employees to become part of the regular work force and to meet normal performance standards.

And I repeat, normal performance standands.

The operation of the program should be keyed to specific localized unemployment problems and focused initially on those areas where the need is most apparent.

Analysis emphasized the critical facts about the underemployed, who he defines as those who work and are still poor. In any analysis of what constitutes the poor in this country, underemployment looms as large, if not larger, than unemployment.

Conservatively, almost 6 million people in this country are underemployed. This is a significant figure since it includes by definition. people who work and are still poor, and does not include unemployed as defined by the Federal Government.

In 1966 at least 6 million members of families worked on some basis and were poor. Therefore, there were perhaps as many as 7.3 million men and women who are labor force participants and yet are poor. It proves that most of them are employed but still do not earn enough to raise their families or themselves out of poverty. Equally significant.

weight must be given to the quality of the unemployed in terms of age, location, duration, et cetera.

Dr. Harold Sheppard of the UpJohn Institute. Analysis of the "needs" of the cities was done by a survey of 130 cities with populations of 100,000 or more. Although not done in depth, the general conclusions of the survey established the fact that in these cities there were at least 280,000 potential positions which were needed but not filled and not budgeted.

Even more significant was the fact that the city representatives estimated that there were at least 140,000 of these jobs that did not require technical or professional training and could be filled by innercity residents.

Contrary to popular belief that these jobs by definition were to make work, 30 percent were in education of which over 27 percent were nonprofessional, 12.4 percent were in health and hospitals of which 13.3 percent were nonprofessional, and 25 percent were in police, fire, and sanitation of which over 23 percent could be filled by nonprofessionals. Most people would consider these categories of work to be essential to the efficient and productive operation of a city.

Reading my testimony makes me nervous and uneasy. I find it very difficult to express what I know and feel about the needs of employment for the unemployed and underemployed in this community and Nation. But I have always had a tremendous amount of faith in the Federal Government, the Congress, and the Senate of the United States. I sleep more at ease when they are speaking about jobs, education, housing, medical assistance, and so forth, than I do when this State or this city speaks on these questions.

I have found in this city and this State many things that have made me very cynical toward the State and the city agencies in Texas. I am totally convinced that this State has no conscience; and the records prove it. In less than 2 weeks the courts have ordered over 50 counties of the State of Texas where hunger exists, to take advantage of the Federal food stamp program.

You know, gentlemen, how long this program has been in existence and yet the State agencies have found a million excuses why this would not work; after it has been proven to be a good thing to have. If family income standards set by the school district were enforced, many poverty families could not afford to pay for meals. Yet they would be ineligible for free food.

Here in this school district, for example, children, according to the regulations, are ineligible for free meals if they come from a family of two making $83 a month, or a family of three making $93 a month, or a family of four or five making $108 a month, or a family of six or seven making $126 a month, or a family of eight or nine making $143 a month, or a family of 10 making $150 a month.

Senator, the State government, the city government, and the school district in Texas have always chiseled on the people. And if the Federal Government is going to approve additional funds to help the city and the school district and the States to create more jobs by allocating more money to help the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed, the hard core, et cetera, I am afraid this is like putting the fox to guard the chickens; those that they don't eat, they will steal.

We can fill up this room with paperwork from the Texas Employment Commission. I have had an opportunity, through our union, to

recruit some 200 people, families, to move to Dallas and I know that the Texas Employment Commission is not geared to go out in the neighborhood and seek out those people and try to help them get employed in meaningful employment. They just don't reach the

poor.

They have their place of business and everybody comes there, applies, and is referred to. We recruited 195 people. They set up to do the paperwork and give them the tests but they didn't think the people were able, with 7th and 8th grade educations, to move to Dallas to an industrial plant of engineers and become machinists. So, I want to talk about what we have done and, not only talk about it because I was the main key in the negotiation of this contract, offer the statistics to prove that people, not just statistics, but facts, that people who are high school dropouts and even grade school dropouts can become auto mechanics, can become welders, can become painters. This is why I gave you a copy of our contract.

In 1957-please bear with me because I have to give you a little history-the American Smelter Corp. started operations in about 1941. When most of the young--including myself. I was young thenwhen most of the young had to go to the Second World War this company had to hire what was available.

So, 80 percent of the work force was people who had not finished. high school and 65 percent were Mexicans who had not even finished 10th grade or the 8th grade in many cases. The crafts jobs in the plants were filled with the people who had the know-how and the black and the Mexican were in the production employment with no place to go except in the labor pool or a truck driver or a third grade operation. So, through negotiations in 1957, we negotiated the principals that have moved some. We didn't want to sit there and every time a craft job came up and somebody was going to be hired and our people were still going to be laborers until they died, fork lift operators. We soon found out that the apprenticeship program, with all its bureaucracy, would not qualify our people. We entered into a training program that would give the people first class wages in 2 years, opportunity to go to school, eliminate the age limit and if a man thought he could make it, if he didn't have a second grade education, he was accepted by seniority and sent to school and paid for the tuition and paid for the books and the most amazing thing is that people with third-grade educations came to school and kept up their grades, studied nights, and now are first class journeymen in that plant.

Of that percentage of high school graduates, 20 percent; high school dropouts, 49 percent; junior high dropouts, 18 percent; and elementary school dropouts, 13 percent. That is the Mexicans. The Anglo, high school graduate, 40 percent; high school dropouts, 55 percent and junior high, 5 percent.

Now, the reason that we were able to train these people through Del Mar Tech here, which, incidentally, in my opinion-I have said this many times-is the best school for vocational training anywhere in the Southwest. It is the best.

The problems of the hard core or the problem is the people that do not have 10th grade reading capacity cannot enter it. The reason that we were able to put people with third and fourth grade education through the school is because the agreement in the contract was between us and the company and we told them these are the people that we want you to train.

Now, to refund or to give additional funds to the city, to expand this under the same criteria they now use is to give us more of the same but never touch the real problem.

I feel that the committee and the Federal Government, when local government and institutes are not sensitive to this problem, that before moneys are allocated, that the Federal Government must make sure that these people get a crack at the job.

We have to do away with the criteria of whether a man is intelligent enough to be a mechanic or intelligent enough to be a painter. I will give you an example, perhaps simple because I am a simple man. I have dealt with this problem from the very bottom.

Twenty-five years ago an industrial painter had to know how to make colors, how to make blue out of white and black out of red, and so on. They had to be able to figure how much paint they were going to use so they didn't buy too much.

Now, in an industrial plant, they have the industrial engineers. They can order 5,000 gallons. They only need 10. Use what you need and send the rest and we will bill you what you use. They don't have to have that knowledge anymore. He doesn't have to have the knowledge of how much paint does he need because the engineers do it for him.

The biggest skill an industrial painter has to have these days is the courage to paint above floor level, 50 feet, 100 feet, 300 feet in the air and the intelligence to set up his scaffolds where he will be safe. So, he doesn't have to have algebra, advanced English, world history, or geography to paint. He needs a strong arm and lots of muscle, you know, to be able to hoist himself up and down without fainting because he is afraid. This is what is needed now.

This is why I wanted Pedro R. Resendez here, because he worked at least 10 or 12 years, fifth grade education, and he can tell you exactly how those married men who are 30, 35, or 40 years old with four or five children, two or three in high school, work; how it feels to go to work 8 hours, then go home, take care of the family problems, perhaps wait until the children go to bed so he can get out of the kitchen and study to 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, a teenager helping him, the neighbor helping him, because how the people feel, how big a sacrifice they have to make in order to be able to move is important and must be taken into consideration.

So, I ask you, Pedro Resendez, to come and speak to us as a man with a fifth grade education, who is not in this 3d year of training and is repairing every truck, every car, every fork lift, every crane, every movable thing that plant has, he is repairing it. There are other ones like him and production has gone up. They haven't busted the plant. They haven't messed up any thing.

This is what is said, "They would make a mess of things." But the educated ones got us in this mess. You give it to them smart ones and they are going to make "dog-gone" sure the little ones don't get it.

So, I appreciate you coming here, Pedro Resendez. He is one of the persons to tell you just what we have got, how it works, how the people feel about it, because this is the type of training, I feel, we need. Senator NELSON. Thank you.

Mr. Resendez.

STATEMENT OF PEDRO RESENDEZ, TRAINING PROGRAM

GRADUATE

Mr. RESENDEZ. Mr. Chairman, like Paul says I don't have much education and certainly I cannot present a case or a grievous near as well as Paul can or as you gentlemen sitting behind that desk but I will try to give you a little history of the things I have been associated with, the help this union has given me, through people like Paul and other people guiding me, in being able to work out our problems with the management, being able to sit down and work out agreements that are beneficial to everyone.

I went to work in that plant in May of 1953. I was 23 years old then, just came out of the service. Like Paul said, this plant was put in operation in 1942. In talking to the older people there that went to work in that plant, people that took management positions in 1942 and 1943, they went out in the farm areas and recruited people to come here and work.

I understand that some of these people were recruited by the qualifications that they had to have. One of them was that they had to talk in Spanish to go out here and get these people in the outlying

areas.

In 1953 when I went to work out there, you could go in and work unskilled labor. You had to work as a laborer with a shovel in your hands, unload boxcars, load acid barges, and things of this nature. We had no hope of ever having one of those higher paying jobs because those people that are doing these jobs, they know how. We never will. They received an education. In 1957 we put the apprenticeship agreement with the company that was basically only one requirement. You didn't have to have a high school education. The company would have to post on the bulletin board a notice that there existed for an apprenticeship and people bid on these jobs.

This was the basic requirement, just bid on them and go on a seniority basis. You take these people, then they would start enrolling in school at Del Mar Tech. They had to have 8,000 hours on the job training, 4 years, and you had to take 576 hours of related instructions in the college.

This would go in relation to the craft that you were involved in, but some of them were basics to all the crafts, like a little math. You had to take 150 hours in shop math mostly, algebra and things of that nature so you can learn to measure a piece of wood or a bolt or a nut or anything like that.

The other thing that is directly related to all the courses is blueprint reading. All of the apprentices take blueprint reading, also drafting.

I think that this has worked out real well. It is not easy and I certainly wouldn't want to give these young people here the impression that drop out of school and then when you are 35 years old, get yourself into school so you can make a good living. It is not easy when you have been out of school since 1943, and not much to begin with, and all of a sudden, you are in college and say I want to work out this algebra problem.

I asked a friend of mine who has a high school education, I asked him, I would like to get together with you and I would like for you