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CONCLUSIONS

As a Nation we are advancing in scientific and technical know-how at a tremendous rate. The end is not in sight. How well we will realize the potential of this advance in terms of the well-being of our people depends in large measure on how effectively our people as individuals-our manpower-are able to use the new tools at hand.

This brief presentation describes our expected manpower resources and requirements for the 1960s. Undoubtedly the facts as they develop will differ in detail from what we now anticipate, but these general conclusions will stand:

WE MUST

Improve individual competence, present and prospec-
tive, across the board

Use all our manpower resources without regard to race,
sex, age or physical handicap

Strive to place every worker in a job that best fits his
talents and then press for full use of these talents on the
job

Help every worker to develop a sense of purpose and
pride in his job

Prepare now for new and changing manpower needs
within the total work force

Develop jobs for all kinds of worker capabilities

Plan on full use of better quality as well as increasing
quantity of manpower

SOURCES OF DATA

The facts of the past and projections for the future used in this pamphlet have been assembled from a number of Federal agencies.

The following are the principal sources of data used:

Department of Labor

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Bureau of Employment Security

Department of Commerce

Bureau of the Census

Office of Business Economics

Department of Agriculture

Department of Health, Education and Welfare

United States Office of Education

[From the New York Times magazine, Apr. 2, 1961]

CHALLENGE OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION II

THE PACE OF AUTOMATION IS QUICKENING. TO ATTAIN ITS PROMISES AND AVOID ITS PERILS WILL DEMAND ENLIGHTENED PLANNING BY BUSINESS, LABOR, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC

(By Arthur J. Goldberg)

WASHINGTON.-President Kennedy has charged a group consisting of seven of American management's foremost officials, seven topflight labor leaders, five eminent private citizens, Secretary of Commerce Hodges and me with the task of recommending to him policies that may be followed by labor, management, or the public for dealing with such major economic questions as foreign competition and the benefits and problems created by automation. We have gone to work against a background of sharply contrasting economic features. Employment in February had a monthly record of 64,700,000. At the same time, unemployment had risen to 5,705,000-the largest number of persons without jobs since the summer of 1941.

I have spoken with hundreds of jobless persons in Chicago, Gary, South Bend, Detroit, Pittsburgh and in the iron-range country of Minnesota. In those places, the economic trend breaks down into its living components-men and women with names and faces, families and problems, pasts and futures. Some were machine tenders, some were carpenters or painters, some were coal miners, some were assembly-line operatives, and so down a long list of occupations. All shared a single feeling: What would they do?

For many of them, recovery would mean jobs. They would go back and try to pick up where they left off. For others, however, their jobs had become lasting casualties of the change surging through economic life, especially industrial enterprises.

This change, defined loosely by the generic term "automation," is becoming so pronounced that some economists have labeled it "a second industrial revolution."

Automation is the most recent phase in the centuries-long search for ways to replace human with mechanical or other forms of energy. In the industrial revolution of the 19th century, power-driven machinery freed man's hands from some forms of labor for the first time in history. The process has continued. In early developments like Oliver Evans' flour mill, with its conveyors and chutes, James Watt's automatic controls for his steam engine, and Charles Babbage's calculator were the seeds for today's mammoth automatic processes that refine oil, make artillery shells, bake cakes, process chemicals. generate electric power, cast engine blocks, dig coal, produce atomic materials, and perform thousands of other jobs.

Since the war, a new element has spurred automation: The growing knowledge of information handling, as in electronic systems and computers. The advent of the electronic brain controlling the mechanical muscle has made possible fully automatic factories and offices-but it has also raised the specter of severe dislocation in the American work force.

The issue being joined in our economy today-one that is present in some form in every major industrial negotiation-is simply stated: How can the necessity for continued increases in productivity, based upon laborsaving techniques, be met without causing individual hardship and widespread unemployment?

It is a familiar issue to Western economies. In Samuel Gompers' autobiography, for example, appears a moving reminiscence from London of the 1850's:

One of my most vivid early recollections is the great trouble that came to the silk weavers when machinery was invented to replace their skill and take their jobs. No thought was given to these men whose trade was gone. Misery and suspense filled the neighborhood with a depressing air of dread. The narrow street echoed with the tramp of men walking the street in groups with no work to do.

Such severe dislocations, with their burden of great human suffering, are historical phenomena.

Today, the effect of technological change has been tempered by an economy generally characterized by broad job opportunities, by an expansion of jobs in service and trade fields, by Government programs like unemployment insurance, and by privately negotiated devices such as supplemental unemployment benefits, payable in some cases to a worker even while he is training for a different industry.

Also, major technical changes in the past have occurred over a period of many years. If they had been telescoped into 5 years, the effects upon both the economy and the social equilibrium would

have been far more severe.

Now, however, the pace of automation is quickening under many pressures. Perhaps the most important of these is the obsolescence of the American industrial plant. A competent estimate has been made that it would cost $95 billion to replace our plant and equipment now obsolete.

At the same time, we see in Western Europe a whole new industrial structure-modern plants and automated equipment-risen from the rubble of war. The goods from those plants are giving us stiff competition in markets that at one time were almost exclusively ours. The combination of these factors-obsolescence here and growing competition abroad-gives real drive to the desire to improve and modernize.

Between

To this is added the momentum provided by the consistent desire for higher standards. A highly developed technology underlies the American success in providing better goods and services for a steadily expanding population. We continue to expect that of it. We are already witnessing the effects of automation. 1947 and 1960, for example, productivity (output per man-hour) in the total private economy increased at an annual average rate of nearly 3.5 percent-as against the long-term increase of 2.4 percent. Even with agricultural productivity taken out of this figure-and agriculture has, of course, been the most greatly affected of all industries by technological change-the average postwar gain has been about 2.7 percent, compared with the long-term nonagricultural rise

of 2.1 percent.

With this acceleration have come employment declines in several industries. During the postwar period, for example, productivity in

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