I would like to say, and I hope this isn't commenting on legislation-it is rather commenting on history, I believe-that without these Federal funds which have been instrumental in the training of so-called disadvantaged people, our community would have been in a much less helpful and hopeful state than it is today because of those funds. I think they are terribly important and the burden of what I want to say is I hope that not only are they continued, but that they are increased. If that is commenting on legislation I would hope to be excused.

The management council was formed in response to the Watts riots of 1965, and came out of a conviction that more needed to be done to provide jobs. Since the private sector at least in past history and the present situation has about six-sevenths of all the jobs that are available, obviously it was up to the private sector to do what it could about it.

Since the riots occurred in Watts it was natural of course to go to south central Los Angeles to see what could be done in the beginning. As has been indicated in a way before, at that time in Watts approximately half the people who were listed as unemployed-and I don't mean this represents the total census of people who perhaps ought to have been employed-did have some marked skills, but there were problems of getting people and jobs together.

The result was that the first efforts of the management council in persuading employers to get to work on this job as they never had before were not difficult in which to achieve success. Within a matter of a month 50 large corporations had sent people to south central Los Angeles, to 103d Street, to actually recruit. We discovered this was necessary. You couldn't wait for people to come to you.

As a result of this activity and other things that were associated with it, a survey was made in November of 1966 to just see how we were getting along. Management council at that time was working. with about 250 firms and this was just a beginning. We are now up to somewhere around 3,000 firms that we work with directly.

The results of that survey made in November of 1966 were that 201 of these 250 firms answered in writing. What they were asked to do was to actually to go to their payrolls and count the number of black people that had been hired from the so-called curfew area. Now this is much bigger than the area Ted Watkins was talking about and you are familiar with. These reports indicated that 17,903 black people had been hired. This was very encouraging and was a good

start.

The next problem-may I digress a bit-perhaps in other testimony this has been thrown in, but you have asked a number of questions about why doesn't there seem to be more progress in unemployment in south central Los Angeles.

While I have been here in the last hour and a half nobody has offered the observation which I think is important and true, and that is that south central Los Angeles is a port of in-migration of very large proportion. Estimates which we have would indicate that black people are coming into south central Los Angeles at the rate of 1,000 a month-this is total population of course, and that Mexican-Americans and similar Spanish-speaking people are coming into east Los Angeles at the rate of 800 a month.

So in some respects we have to run fast or stand still on this problem.

Senator CRANSTON. How fast are they moving out of those points of embarkation to other areas?

Mr. COOPER. I can only give you, Senator, one bit of information about this and it is tied into a survey which U.S.C. made for the management council and I would like to refer to it a little bit for just a minute. The indication was that when people got jobs in south central Los Angeles, that about 30 to 40 percent of them moved to better locations, to better housing and maybe it was just west of the Harbor Freeway instead of staying on the east side of the Harbor Freeway, but they did move and consequently we feel sure that there is a steady movement of people out of south central Los Angeles into other areas and that they are replaced by people coming into this Los Angeles County area from quite different areas in the United States.

So this is a migration problem, it's a terrific one. My personal observation would be that the new residents in these areas are really less capable of taking jobs than even those who were here before. They are not particularly oriented to city life for one thing, and their total experience is kind of a nonindustrial relationship. I just throw this in because I think it is an important fact in the study of what really is happening here and that is we've really got a tremendous immigration that we have to cope with.

Now as contrasted to the fact that in the fall of 1965, perhaps half of these listed unemployed people had marketable skills, there is ample agreement today that 90 percent of the unemployed people in our disadvantaged areas have got to have some kind of prejob training before they can take even entry level jobs in business and industry.

This is a very substantial change and there isn't any answer to this problem other than remedial basic education and training.

Let me tell you just a little bit about the sort of thing that has happened and I think more of it has to happen.

The first attack on the problem was the so-called skill center. These are supported by MDTA funds devoted to the use of institutional type education and training. We have five of them in Los Angeles now.

The first ones were established in 1966 and now there are a total of five of these; four of these are operated by the Los Angeles City School District and one of them is operated by a private training institution, the West Coast Trade Schools. I would say that the jobs they do in either case is comparable and it's good.

The population in these training schools, of course, depends on the amount of funds available. Unfortunately, while some 10,000 people so far have been enrolled in these five skill centers, the skill centers have never been able to operate at more than roughly about 50 percent capacity due to funding situations.

There have been thousands of people waiting to get into them in spite of the fact that the first one that was opened was actually picketed by the people whom it was intended to serve simply because there wasn't good understanding of what the skill center was intended to do.

These have been successful institutions-the five of them.

I can only wish that during this past couple of years we had been able to operate them at full capacity, and those additional costs would not have been in proportion to the cost existing because you already have the plants, you already have the equipment, you already

have the management and the supervision, so the additional cost would. have simply been the added costs of instructor services to take care of the additional people.

About two-thirds to three-fourths--it varies a little depending on the type of course and of the enrollees in the skill centers, completed the course. This is rather remarkable in itself, and of those who completed the course and stayed in this labor market area-a few moved away, a few did some other things that were different-of those who completed the course and stayed in this labor market area, 93 percent of them had meaningful jobs in 2 weeks after the end of the period of training. This has been a major attack upon this tremendous unemployment problem in this area and it would be tragic if this program were not continued.

I would like to offer a few comments, and here again I hope this doesn't relate to legislation-this deals more with administration perhaps than legislation.

The problems have been something like these in addition to the fact that there wasn't enough money to really run them at the capacity at which they should have enjoyed. In some of the smaller skill centers you cannot offer the same range of courses in skill training that you can in larger ones. This means that you either turn away the individual from the sort of training for which he is suited, and which he wants or perhaps you accept him with some doubt in your mind about the type of training hoping that perhaps it is going to be what he wants and what he can use.

Now that is rather a minor problem but the training in such cases has not exactly been appropriate. The figures run something like onetenth of the total trainees graduating were placed in jobs which were not directly connected with the training which they got in the skill center. If we can correct this by the amplification of the courses offered in all the skill centers which are geographically located all over this wide area-East Los Angeles, Watts, Venice, Pacomia, and Southwest Los Angeles, of course we can improve this sort of situation.

Another problem we have had is that the funding has been kind of off and on. For example, last year and this year, the money to operate that should have been available a little prior to the 1st of September, didn't actually arrive until November or December.

Now the instructor forces in these skill centers are not taken out of the regular school. These people are recruited from industry and this is a very good thing, this is the practical way to teach. It simply means that you lay off these people and then have to hunt them up later and get them back again. Now I understand that in the legisla tion just passed, with respect to appropriations, that there is an opportunity to continue past June 30 of any fiscal year with some of the money that is available and perhaps this will help with this problem.

Now the second thing that came into the picture that I want to talk about, and I am only trying to talk about the things with which I am personally familiar, is the so-called manpower administrative series of funding, MA-2, 3, 4, and 5. We are now in the No. 5 stage. We have had very good experience in this area with every indication that even in the MA-5, and we have been at this now for just a couple months, that we will have even greater success in contracts of this sort than we have ever had before.

These are going to be a little more expensive than in the past because we are getting into higher skills than ever before. When we first started out in this survey that was made by the business school at U.S.C., we found that the average wage being paid by the people who had been employed in that first period, was $2.75 an hour and it varied on both sides of that figure of course, but today we are getting contracts in construction and in fields which are going to be up in the $5 and $6 an hour range. This necessarily means that the portion of the cost of the MA contract which relates to the salary paid to the employee while he is being trained, is going to be substantially larger than ever before.

To illustrate this, we have an agreement with the Dry Wall Contractor's Association and this involves 22 different employers. There are 150 people to be trained under this program. We were dealing here with a situation in which the beginning trainee wage was about $3.50 an hour and at the end of 12 months the going rate would be $6.50 an hour and it is even higher than that today.

This is most worth doing-most worth doing, and yet the costs are going to be higher. In other words without additional funds we cannot train as many people in fields which are very important for the disadvantaged people to get into.

The Senator asked a question a while ago of whether or not experience shows that disadvantaged people really didn't want to work. Our experience is that this is not true at all. Of course there is always a marginal group in any society who perhaps are a bit on the lazy side but our experience is that fully 85 percent of these disadvantaged people when they can be given the help that is necessary to get them oriented to job situations in business and industry, are highly motivated to work and are also just as successful as the people that you hire off the streets who are not classified as disadvantaged.

I said a while ago I wanted to refer a little bit to the USC study which was made and management council has had this study made because we were being challenged a bit as to how successful we were being, really, and we felt it was time to do it. So we raised $13,500 from local sources and ask the business school at the University of Southern California to make a study on their own behalf. We wanted nothing to do with it other than we would furnish the money, but it was to be their study and they did issue it as a publication of the business school at USC and this is what was found. It was most encouraging.

Two-thirds of those first hired at the end of about 12 months were still employed by the same company-incidentally this was a scientific sampling proposition and they actually talked to the individual employees to see how they felt about it and what had actually happened to them. Two-thirds of them were still working for the same employer. The average rate of pay as I said before, and this included a number of women in the group, was $2.75 an hour. Most of these workers said it was the best job they had ever had; 30 percent of those surveyed had moved into better homes during the period of the 12-month period; and most of them had actually moved out of the area. Not a single one of the black people interviewed said that he had been laid off, if this had been his fate, because of race discrimination and of the one-third who had left the initial job, half these people had better jobs and had better pay with another employer. In other words they upgraded themselves.

We were very encouraged about this and felt that this certainly warranted further activities of the management council and we have gone on from that point still trying to broaden the basis of employer participation and trying to provide greater opportunities for this sort of thing.

Now may I speak just a bit about NAB. NAB is the newest entry in this community in the effort of the private sector and of course you are familiar with it as a national nonprofit corporation. I don't know whether it has any foundation money or not. I couldn't be sure of that.

NAB as you know operates on the basis of first securing as an incentive from the employer a pledge to hire a certain number of people, and in connection with the NAB program the MA series of Federal Government training subsidies is offered. NAB's job is to acquaint the employer with the subsidy program and then, if he shows an interest, we turn him over to the representatives of the Department of Labor to negotiate contracts, but we are kept in contact with these contract proceedings and are aware of how successful we are.

In the time that NAB has been operating in Los Angeles, which as I say now is about 17 months, we have come up with over 33,000 job pledges. This is substantial.

The natural question that people ask is how many of them are going to be converted into jobs-will really be converted to hires. It is true that some employers run into difficulties with their own. economic situation or something of this sort-incidentally I should say we do not accept pledges unless we believe that the employer has a reasonable chance of making good on that pledge. Except for that, we find that most employers are conservative in the number of jobs that they will promise to hire and the result is that we have actually I don't doubt that if economic conditions remain as they are today we have actually more hires than pledges. I can illustrate this by just referring to something that is a matter of public knowledge. For example, a study was made of the MA-2, -3, and -4 contracts in this Los Angeles area and also 91 noncontract pledges. If you lump these all together, the total pledges were 7,552 jobs pledged to total hires of 7,701. Even that figure is low because you would recognize that pledges made recently would have had less opportunity to be turned into job hires than those made some time ago. This can be illustrated by this sort of thing in MA-2 contracts, for example, there were 552 jobs pledged and 710 hired. We-when we got to MA-4 and this survey was made just at the close of that period--we had 1,931 jobs pledged; 686 actually hired. In other words the employer makes a pledge that by a certain date he will hire so many people and train them and that fact is reflected in these figures.

Senator CRANSTON. Is it a contract obligation or a statement made prior to negotiating the contract?

Mr. COOPER. A pledge outside of contract? It is made as a matter of good faith. As I say, we do not solicit nor encourage employers to make pledges unless we think they can make good on those pledges. We want to make sure there is good intention, good faith in them. Now some of them don't succeed but as I say, these are more than offset by employers who do succeed and hire more people than they thought they would. So if economic conditions remain as good as they are, I have no doubt at all that the 33,000 job pledges will all be turned into job hires.