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Moreover, it would be impossible to assure that such tax credits were not being given to employers for doing what they would have done anyway-that is, to hire workers to meet the employers' normal needs. Consequently, the proposed program of tax credits could represent a windfall to employers without necessarily accomplishing the purpose for which the credit is proposed.

So far as the proposed program of Community Service Employment is concerned, we see the need for a substantially greater number of jobs. We also have reservations about the extent to which priority is given in the National Manpower Act of 1968 to the creation of small service companies as the mechanism through which the jobs are to be created. There is a place for such service organizations, but we believe priority should be given to public service jobs in regular government and non-profit agencies, where there would be greater opportunity for the workers to move up the job ladder to greater skills and incomes. Another major feature of the National Manpower Act of 1968 which we would question is the proposed Economic Opportunity Corporation.

We are not sure that we understand its purpose. It would appear to duplicate activities already being carried on by existing bodies, both public and private, especially with regard to providing information and technical assistance, and the conduct of research. And, so far as mobilizing the private sector is concerned, we are not convinced that such a formalized arrangement is necessarily more desirable than the present approach which is embodied in activities of groups such as the Urban Coalition and the National Alliance of Businessmen. It seems to us that the kind of representational activity which the proposal advocates as a means of expediting private-sector involvement could be accomplished through advisory bodies, assuming there is in existence the legislative authority for carrying out the programs for which such involvement is sought.

In summary, H.R. 16303 indicates concern for the problems of the unemployed and seriously underemployed. However, the total number of jobs involved in this proposal is altogether too small-even if fully achieved, 300,000 jobs would hardly make a dent in the problem.

Moreover, the major emphasis of this bill is on a tax subsidy to private business for hiring unemployed and seriously underemployed workers-which employers normally do, when entry-level jobs open up. There is little, if any, new job creation involved in this major part of the bill.

The clear-cut job-creation proposal in this bill is 80,000 public service jobs in the first year and 100,000 in the second year-a very long way from providing a keystone for meeting the urgent needs of about 3 million to 5 million people who are long-term unemployed or seriously underemployed.

[From the Wall Street Journal, Friday, Apr. 26, 1968]

POLITICS AND PEOPLE-HOW MANY JOBS?

(By Alan L. Otten)

WASHINGTON.-One reason President Johnson isn't seeking big new urban-help programs in the wake of the recent rioting is his belief that Congress wouldn't approve them; he doesn't want to raise excessive hopes among the poor by asking for help he knows they won't get, the White House explains.

Richard Nixon says he won't join those who promise billions of Federal dollars to rebuild America's cities, because the budget bind makes such promises "dishonest and a cruel delusion."

This concern about raising excssive hopes has become a favorite bipartisan explanation (critics might call it a rationalization) among those opposing any dramatic new Government moves. Yet this same over-optimism may be the tragic flaw in the politicians' favorite alternative answer to the problems of the urban poor: Massive involvement of private enterprise.

Consider the Administration's three-year program, now being launched with great fanfare, for Federally subsidizing business to hire and train some 500,000 men and women chronically unable to find work or out of work for a long time; the goal is to hire 100,000 of these hard-core unemployed in the next year. A 65-member National Alliance of Businessmen will spearhead the 50-city campaign, acronymically entitled Job Opportunities in the Business Sector.

It's a laudable effort, by dedicated citizens giving unselfishly of time and energy, and they seem to be going about it in a highly professional way. There

are local orientation meetings, quotas for each city, hiring-pledges from individual enterprises, magazine ads urging businessmen to join up.

Maybe this campaign can indeed accomplish what earlier ones have not. But the problems are enormous, and certainly the previous efforts have been a disappointment. Business response was sluggish. Administrators often reported far more success at putting hard-core unemployed in school or in public work than in private jobs. Dropout rates were high, both during training and afterward.

One knotty question facing JOBS recruiters: How far down into the pool will they dip? Their target is "poor persons . . . who are either school dropouts, under 22 years of age, 45 years of age or over, handicapped, or subject to special obstacles to employment." That core sounds hard enough, but chances are a lot of recruits will be people who lost their jobs not so long ago and probably would soon have found new ones anyhow. Business is still out to make money, after all, and it's still easier to recruit and train people with some motivation and job experience than those with little or none.

The Administration's three-year target of 500,000 jobs is the official estimate of hard-core unemployment in the 50 cities, averaging out to a little over 3,000 in each city each year. But many experts believe the real number is two to six times the 500,000, counting such groups as those who have simply given up the search for work. In the District of Columbia, for instance, where the first-year JOBS quota is 2,000, even the official estimate of hard-core joblessness is 8,000 to 12,000, and "for every hard-core unemployed person we go out to recruit, we find several more," says Fred Hetzel, the local U.S. Employment Service director. "How many are out there?"

As fast as some hard-core unemployed find jobs, other low-skilled workers are losing theirs to automation and other factors. The very success of the newly employed persons may draw into the labor market friends and relatives who haven't been looking for work, or attract to the big cities still more poor families from rural areas. Even if the 500,000 goal is fully achieved, says manpower specialist Garth Mangum of George Washington University, "we will never notice the difference."

That may be the basic drawback of the JOBS campaign. The openings it seeks to filll already exist; it is not creating additional jobs. Moreover, present Government economic policy may even be reducing industry's manpower need; Federal spending plans are being trimmed, to quiet some of the boom in the economy. and invariably the least- skilled workers are fired first as the economy cools.

So other routes may have to be explored, too. Some specialists urge a harder sell to persuade employers permanently to lower hiring standards and unions to lower membership requirements. Others think the Government must subsidize business not only to train less-skilled, less-productive workers but also to keep them employed. And still other experts believe that along with all this there must be an extensive program of Government employment for those willing to work but unable to find it in private industry.

A series of high-level commissions-most recently the President's "riot commission" has proposed that the Government not only spur private hiring but also itself become an "employer of last resort." So has the prestigious Urban Coalition, with its considerable business membership. Most of these recommendations talk of a million or more "meaningful" public service jobs-working for the Federal Government and also, with Federal financial help, for state and local governments and non-profit institutions.

To dismiss such involvement as mere leaf-raking is to write off the roads and bridges, parks and playgrounds, paintings and plays created during the depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps., National Youth Administration and Works Progress Administration. Today's counterparts could be cleaning up slum neighborhoods, helping professional staffers in schools and hospitals and parks and libraries, baby-sitting for working mothers, providing extra mail deliveries for business. Most of the proposals envisage schooling and counseling along with the make-work, to help the men and women eventually move up to better positions.

The JOBS program and other Federal efforts to induce business to hire more hard-core unemployed are eminently worthwhile, and by all means must go forward. But their accomplishments may at best make a small dent in the problem, and perhaps a more open-minded attitde toward expanded Government employment is also in order. No one here is sure how much it would ease the slum tensions that so deeply worry the politicians and everyone else. What people do say, however, is that there's no bigger or more expensive make-work program than rebuilding burned-down cities.

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ally, with particularly low standards for Negroes and Mexican Americans; social patterns to enforce the dependency of both poor whites and Negroes.

Since World War II and particularly since the early 1950s, the spread of automation has been reducing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that require little or no education or training. The types of jobs that helped to adjust previous generations of foreign immigrants and rural American migrants to America's urban areas have not been expanding.

In ghetto areas in the cities, about 10 percent to 15 percent of the adult men and about 40 percent to 50 percent of out-of-school teenagers (including an estimate of those usually not counted by the Labor Department) are unemployed. In addition, a Labor Department survey of slum areas in November 1966 found that nearly 7 percent of those with jobs were employed only part-time, although they wanted fulltime work, and 20 percent of those working full-time earned less than $60 a week. This same Labor Department survey found that nearly 40 percent of the families and unrelated individuals in big city slum areas earn less than $3,000 a year.

However, it costs about $7,000, at present prices, to maintain a modest standard of living, including a few amenities but no luxuries, for a family of four in America's metropolitan areas-more for a larger family and less for a smaller family. Elimination of the amenities would result in a cost of about $5,000 to maintain a minimum decent standard of living for a family of four in our urban areas-scaled up and down for different family sizes.

Yet government reports indicate that probably about 20 percent of the population, within city limits, earn less than the amount necessary for a minimum decent standard of living. Within ghetto areas, perhaps 60

percent to 70 percent or more of the families are in that category. The result is badly overcrowded housing, inadequate diet, poor medical care, few books and magazines for about 20 percent of city families and about 60 to 70 percent of those who live in ghetto slums.

The hardcore slum areas continue to deteriorate. People with jobs, some skills and some regular incomes have been moving out. They are replaced with new migrants from the rural South-adding to the remaining lowest-income families, the jobless, the aged and fatherless families.

A large proportion of these slum residents depend on welfare payments, often to mothers with dependent children and no father present. The Labor Department survey of November 1966 found that 30 percent of the population of East Harlem, 30 percent of the Watts population, 40 percent of the BedfordStuyvesant children and 25 percent of the adults receive welfare payments. Moreover, the lack of adequate child-care facilities in slum areas is a barrier to employment for women with children.

Trapped by a history of degradation and the recent impact of automation, these new migrants to the city are also trapped by the unavailability of low-andmoderate cost housing, as well as by discrimination against colored peoples.

The peak home construction year before World War II was 1925. From 1926 to 1945, a period of 20 years, home-building was in a slump. It wasn't until 1946 that the 1925-level of housing starts was reached.

Since 1945, the ups and downs of residential construction have followed conditions in the money market -interest rates and availability of money. Normal

business operations and government programs have provided housing for families in the middle-income range and above (at present, about $7,000-$8,000 annual income and more).

The residential construction of the postwar period, however, has essentially ignored housing for the entire bottom half of our income distribution-for the lower middle-income group as well as the poor.

For lower middle-income families, with current incomes of about $5,000 to $8,000, the postwar years have seen only little new housing construction, with present rentals or carrying charges and taxes of about $85-$135 per month. This is particularly true for large families, with three or more children, in this income-range.

For the urban poor-families with current incomes of about $5,000 a year and less-there has been hardly any new housing construction during the 22 years since World War II and there was very little of such construction in the preceding 20 years from 1926 through 1945. Almost a half-century of rapid change in our cities-including the great Negro migration has passed with hardly any housing construction for low-income families.

Realistic rentals for poor families would have to be concentrated around $40 to $70 a month. Since the private market cannot provide such housing, public housing and public rehabilitation are essential. But, in recent years, the total number of new public dwelling units has been only about 30,000-40,000 per year. Moreover, the urban renewal program, which has bulldozed Negro slum areas, has concentrated on the construction of commercial buildings and luxury highrise apartments. Relocation of families displaced from the slums has been neglected or ignored and there has been hardly any replacement of low-rental housing.

In addition, during the 1950s and early 1960s, the traditional conservative opposition to low-cost publicly subsidized housing for the poor was joined by many so-called liberals-the same coalition that debunked the impact of automation on unskilled and semi-skilled factory workers and on industrial location as a trade union myth.

At the same time, middle and upper-income families have been moving to the suburbs. This movement has opened up older housing in the cities. But, combined with the movement of industry to the suburbs and countryside, it has reduced the tax-base of the cities, when the demands on their financial resources for housing, welfare, education and public facilities are mounting. Moreover, the change of industrial location has compounded the problems of inadequate mass transportation facilities for low-income city-dwellers to get to the new areas of employment growth. And most suburban communities have rather rigid colorbar restrictions, as well as an absence of low-cost housing.

The New Deal's beginnings to provide low-cost public housing nearly perished between 1952 and

1966. And much of the long-delayed legislation of the 1960s to achieve partial adjustments to the radical changes in American life were first steps, without previous experience, precedents and trained personnel. Moreover, federal appropriations for even these purposes were kept down by public apathy. Yet, they were greatly oversold and their adoption aroused expectations of overnight solutions that were impossible to achieve.

America's urban crisis is a national complex of social problems-rather than simple problems of individual communities. No city or state government can solve them in isolation. Neither can private enterprise, even with the promise of tax subsidies. Their solution requires nationwide social measures, with adequate federal funds and standards.

Step by step, we must begin immediately to rebuild America's cities and lift the living conditions of the American people.

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There are a large number of people who cannot find regular employment in the job market due to insufficient jobs for those who lack education, vocational training and previous regular employment. Such long-term unemployed and under-employed persons, including those who have given up seeking jobs, should be given the opportunity to work in local, state, federal and non-profit public services that would not otherwise be done.

Jobs of this type, with wages not less than the federal minimum wage, could provide services for which society has growing needs-such as in parks, recreational facilities, day-care centers, hospitals, schools and libraries. In endorsing the concept of such a program, the tri-partite National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress declared:

"The public service employment program should be coupled with basic education, training and counseling to raise the productivity of the employes and assist them to move on to better jobs. With this assistance the opportunity for higher incomes would provide the necessary incentive to seek other jobs. Since the jobs would provide services for which society has growing needs, no element of make-work would be involved."

We urge immediate adoption by the Congress of a $4 billion program, along the lines of the bill introduced by Congressman O'Hara of Michigan and 76

96-292 0-68-16

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