EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING LEGISLATION-1968 TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 1968 U.S. SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT, MANPOWER, AND POVERTY, OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE, The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 1202, New Senate Office Building, Senator Joseph S. Clark (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Senators Clark (presiding), Randolph, Pell, Javits, Prouty, and Murphy, members of the subcommittee; Yarborough, and Williams of New Jersey, members of the full committee. Committee staff present: Stewart E. McClure, chief clerk; William C. Smith, counsel to the subcommittee; Michael W. Kirst, professional staff member; Eugene Mittelman, minority counsel; Robert E. Patricelli, minority counsel to the subcommittee; and Peter C. Benedict, minority labor counsel. Senator CLARK. The subcommittee will be in session. I have a very brief opening statement. We continue our hearings today on the Emergency Employment and Training Act of 1968 and National Manpower Act of 1968 which is Senator Javits' and Senator Prouty's substitute for the Emergency Act. Today is a special occasion. We have as our witnesses Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the leadership of the Poor People's Campaign which began its activities here in Washington yesterday. I would like to welcome you, Reverend Abernathy, as representing and perpetuating the ideals of social, economic, and political democracy for which the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., lived and died. I welcome also your colleagues. I suggest that at this point you introduce them to the members of the subcommittee. STATEMENT OF REV. DR. RALPH DAVID ABERNATHY, PRESIDENT, SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE Reverend ABERNATHY. Thank you very kindly, Senator Clark, and members of this distinguished committee. I would like to introduce my associates. To my left is the Reverend Andrew Young who is the executive vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Then the Reverend Bernard Scott Lee, who is my special assistant. Mrs. Lares Tresjan, from the State of New York, representing the Puerto Rican community. To my immediate right, Mrs. Alberta Scott, of Baltimore, Md. Mrs. Martha Grass, representing the American Indians. Mrs. Phyllis Robinson, from the Welfare Rights Movement. Senator CLARK. Thank you very much, Dr. Abernathy. I would like to welcome all of you ladies and gentlemen here today. We are happy, indeed, to have the opportunity to hear your testimony. I want also to say, as one Senator and the chairman of this subcommittee which concerns itself primarily with the problems of poverty, manpower, employment, and related problems, which are very critical today in our country, that we are very happy to welcome representatives of the poor people to Washington. The goals which you are seeking from your representatives in this country are goals which should be sought by every American citizen namely, equal opportunity for all Americans, jobs for more than 41⁄2 million Americans who today are unemployed, better jobs that pay a living wage for the more than 8 million Americans who work but do not make a decent living wage, better education, adequate housing, and more food so that those 1212 million Americans who go to bed hungry will be able to have the three square meals a day which most of their fellow Americans take for granted. While, Reverend Abernathy, we want you to feel free to discuss any subjects that you believe are relevant to your march here on Washington, I will direct your particular attention to four pieces of legislation over which the subcommittee has jurisdiction. The first is the Emergency Employment Act of 1968 which would create in a 4-year period 2,400,000 jobs for the hard-core unemployed, one-half of them in the private sector of the economy, the other half in the public sector. Then there is an area which is central but not entirely peripheral to your interest and this is the Juvenile Delinquency Amendment of 1968 which the subcommittee reported unanimously to the full committee. Also the equal employment opportunity legislation which was passed out of the full labor committee and sent to the floor last week. That will be a very controversial bill when it reaches the floor. There is a good deal of opposition to it. We would like to know your views as to whether this legislation is necessary or desirable. Finally, the amendment to the Manpower Development and Training Act by which we would hope to train personnel for the jobs we believe are available. Senator Prouty. Senator PROUTY. Mr. Abernathy, it is a pleasure to have you appear before our subcommittee this morning. I think you are aware that I supported programs for proposed legislation to eliminate hardships caused by poverty long before the so-called war on poverty was officially launched in 1964. Needless to say, here in 1968, I am not satisfied with our progress, although I am convinced that progress has been made. We hope to step it up in the future. I am very glad to see you and your associates this morning, and I will listen to your statement with interest. Senator CLARK. Senator Javits. Senator JAVITS. Reverend Abernathy and associates, it is the right of Americans to be heard by Congress and seek redress for their grievances. It is a constitutional right. And I think it is significant this morning that, notwithstanding the newspaper advertising, the group arrived thoroughly representative and on time. I think that is a very significant point as to how it is going to be run from this point on. Mr. Chairman, I would like to add to the list of measures which the Chair has mentioned, to which we must address ourselves, the entire antipoverty program. There is nothing sacrosanct about that. We have complete legislative jurisdiction over it and I, for one Senator, will be very much interested to hear what the people whom the legislation is supposed to assist think about it, what they think ought to be done about it and whether they think the whole approach is right or they think it is wrong or some other approach should be substituted, and if so, what it is. Finally, I would wish to add to the list S. 3249, the manpower bill which the Chair was gracious enough to refer to in his introduction, which has been introduced by Senator Prouty and myself and a considerable number of other Senators and Members of Congress. I wish to assure you, Reverend, that we will give you undivided attention. We are very interested to hear what are the grievances and how those who are directly affected feel they should be dealt with. It is the dignity which I know that you hunger for more than anything else and we will do our utmost to contribute. Thank you. Senator CLARK. Dr. Abernathy, you will proceed if you will, in your own way. Doctor, reading through your statement you have rather pungent and constructive references to housing legislation and its need. As you know, this subcommittee has no jursidiction over that subcommittee but we do have a housing bill on the floor which we are interested in. Senator Javits and I and perhaps Senator Prouty, at one point spent a good deal of time before the Subcommittee on Housing of the Banking and Currency Committee so we are interested in that subject, too, although we don't have jurisdiction over it. I think what I will do if it is in agreement with you, Dr. Abernathy, is to have your entire statement printed in full in the record at this point. You can either read it or depart from it as you see fit, and you won't feel you have to follow every word. (The prepared statement of Reverend Abernathy follows:) PREPARED STAtement of Rev. Dr. Ralph DAVID ABERNATHY, PRESIDENT, Mr. Chairman and members of this Committee, we appreciate the opportunity to come before you today. We come to you as representatives of Black, Indian, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican and White-Americans who are the too-long forgotten hungry and jobless outcasts in this land of plenty. We come because poor fathers and mothers want a house to live in that will protect their children against the bitter winter cold, the searing heat of summer and the rain that now too often comes in through the cracks in our roofs and walls. We have come here to say that we don't think it's too much to ask for a decent place to live in at reasonable prices in a country with a Gross National Product of 800 billion dollars. We don't think it's too radical to want to help choose the type of housing and the location. We don't think it's asking for pie 94-753-68-19 in the sky to want to live in neighborhoods where our families can live and grow up with dignity, surrounded by the kind of facilities and services that other Americans take for granted. And we want to play a productive part in building those houses and facilities, and in helping to provide some of those services. It is a cruel fact that too few of our fellow Americans know or care that existing housing programs for poor people are totally inadequate. But then maybe too few of them have seen with their own eyes the reservations, the migrant camps, the shacks and lean-tos in rural Mississippi and Alabama, the teeming ghettos and barrios of the North and West where we and our children are literally perishing. Can it really be believed that we really don't care that our chlidren are bitten by rats, that we are packed into barren cubbyholes, plagued by roaches, our health threatened by roaches and garbage? Surely it must be understood that we must not, we cannot, we will not continue this way. We call upon the Congress to pass legislation that will provide for the thousands of new units of low income housing so desperately needed this year, and for the thousands more that must be added in the next three or four years if all of our people are to be housed like human beings. We ask that Congress give the solid support and all the necessary funds to make the rent supplement program the stabilizing force it can be; we ask that Model City programs he expanded from nighborhoods to communities and that programs be passed which will give poor people a chance to be home-owners rather than slumrenters. We have heard that when zoos are planned, great care is taken to make sure that an environment is created where animals can be happy and feel at home. Are the poor citizens of this land entitled to any less consideration by their government? The unemployment rates in our rural and urban ghettos are of alarming proportions. This Committee knows better than anyone that, despite America's widely publicized affluence, hundreds of thousands of Americans daily drag out their lives in depths of an economic Depression as crippling as this country has ever known. There are those who like to salve their consciences and confirm their prejudices by saying that most of the poor really don't want to work, that poor people really prefer the shabby and insulting handouts which represent Welfare in too many cities and counties in this country. We are here to tell you that this is not true. We are here because we want to work. But we are tired of being told that there are no jobs for which we are qualified. We want training programs. But we are tired of training programs that either screen us out by discrimination or meaningless tests, which ask our families to suffer from inadequate support while we are in training. But the most bitter mockery of all is to find that either there is no job at all waiting at the end, or that we are once again condemned to exchange our manhood for dead-end jobs which pay a boy's wages. Existing programs for creating jobs simply are not working. The Concentrated Employment Program which the Labor Department predicted would produce 150,000 jobs by January 1968 produced only 8,000 jobs. Why? What went wrong? Can it be that we are still trying the same old approaches and the same people to try to solve the problems of the poor? We cannot answer these questions. We can only say that we need those thousands of still uncreated jobs. We need them badly. We need them now. We need to have money in our pockets, to be able to hold our heads up and make our families proud of us. We need a minimum of one million jobs in the public and private sector this year and another million jobs over the next four years. If we are serious about wanting to provide economic opportunities for the poor, then we must see to it that the welfare trap is sprung for the able-bodied, so that they can get out of poverty and stay out. At the same time we must provide for, not punish through restrictive rules and pitiful allowances, those mothers who may choose to stay at home and raise their children as other mothers do. We must insure support at a civilized level for those who are too young, too old, or who are physically or mentally disabled. We need an immediate income maintenance program. At a bare minimum this Congress should set a fair Federal standard of need for welfare payments. And we must, in the name of God, repeal the forced work program for mothers and the freeze on AFDC mothers contained in the Social Security Act of 1967. We have heard all our lives that there are no gains without pains. And all our lives we have had to endure the pains without gains. Is it too much to ask that this time if taxes are raised and expenditures cut, it not be done at the expense of the poor? While we regard the Clark bill now pending before Congress as only a beginning, we want it to pass. But why do those who ask, "Where will the money come from?" look always to the programs that will help those who already have least? We ask those who would wield the meat ax on appropriations to think a while this time before they wield it against the black and brown and white Americans whose children too often go to sleep without having had either meat or bread. Must we support a multi-billion dollar space program, a massive defense budget, millions for supersonic pleasure planes, tax advantages to the richest and most powerful corporations in the world-can we do all these things, and yet not provide a job that pays a living wage, a recent house, the food to make a child healthy and strong? Pending in this Subcommittee is a bill to protect farm workers through collective bargaining. We urge its immediate enaction with maximum safeguards for the workers. Members of this subcommittee have held poverty hearings all over the country. You went to Mississippi. You went to Appalachia. You heard about what hunger does and you saw some of its scars with your own eyes. And then you came back to Washington. We have come here to see you today to tell you that the people you heard, the children you saw, are still where you left them-and they are still hungry. There are programs to be sure. But a food stamp program doesn't feed people who don't have the money or the jobs to help them buy stamps-however low you cut the costs. The food stamps do not even offer a bitter pill to swallow for the poor people who live in some 256 of the neediest counties of this country that are without any food program at all. We do not understand how this can be tolerated in a land as rich as ours. The Citizens' Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States has documented the extent of extreme hunger in this country. Many federal officials, including the officials of the Department of Agriculture, do not deny the accuracy of this report. In the face of this overwhelming evidence, we do not understand why the Department of Agriculture hesitates. We do not understand how the Department of Agriculture could turn back to the Treasury $220 million that could be used to feed the hungry merely by declaring what everyone admits is true-that a serious emergency exists in these counties. We do not understand why the Surgeon General has not yet begun to study the extent of hunger and malnutrition in this country as directed by this committee many months ago. Does this country care so little for us? And if we count for so little, how can our country expect us to continue to care for it when it is so unmindful of our most basic needs to survive? We ask your assistance. We request that this Committee obtain information from the Department of Agriculture on the steps it has taken to alleviate conditions of hunger and malnutrition within the last twelve months. We request that you ask the Department of Agriculture what action it will take in the immediate future to bring food to the neediest counties and the neediest people of this nation. We ask that this Committee give serious and prompt consideration to the recommendations of the Citizens' Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States: A declaration that a national emergency exists; An emergency food program in the 256 hunger counties; Access to food programs on the basis of need, not on the basis of place of residence; Proposal of a free Food Stamp Program keyed to income, dependents and medical expenses; Special recognition of the dietary needs of children, pregnant women, the aged and the sick; and School lunch programs that are available to every child. If you can do these things, you will have made a small start. The poor and the hungry of this nation cannot understand how you can do less. We do not believe that it should be too hard to know where the choice of a wise and just Government must lie. Reverend ABERNATHY. Thank you very kindly, Mr. Chairman and Senator Clark and Senator Prouty and Senator Javits for your kind |