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programs, as compared to a 27.2% enrollment rate for white referrals. This still means, however, that only 80 minority people from Indianapolis and heavily black Gary joined apprenticeship programs.

The Employment Service has been given a major share of the federal government responsibility for increasing minority participation in apprenticeship programs. Yet one BAT official said that, of all the minorities who enrolled as apprentices in the past few years, more came into the programs on their own than through the Employment Service's AIC's and Outreach programs combined. The national record of minority access to well-paid construction and skilled trade jobs is still shameful. It is no longer feasible to expect that the ES will be the vehicle for changing that situation.

8. Enforcement. The primary agency for policing the minorities policies of the manpower programs is the Office of Equal Opportunity in Manpower, within the Department of Labor. The 1969 report for the Civil Rights Commission commended this office, especially the fact that its operations were centralized in Washington. 30/ It recommended that the 27-man office be expanded, and that "its use of Washingtonbased investigative personnel" be increased. By March 1971, the Equal Opportunity unit had been regionalized along with many other aspects of the Manpower Administration; a staff of 7 professionals remain in Washington to provide technical support, and 2 or 3 EEO officers are stationed in each Regional Manpower Office.31 /

The Office of Equal Opportunity is charged with enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; its staff enter into compliance agreements with State Employment Services and attempt to police the states' adherence to those agreements. In case of persistent, flagrant, discrimination, the complaints and supporting documentation are forwarded to the office of the Solicitor of Labor, who must decide whether to propose cutting off federal funds for noncompliance. Before cutting off funds, (which has never occurred) the Department would hold a hearing, before an ad hoc panel designated by the Secretary. By contrast, HEW has a formal mechanism for this, with a standing panel of experts who hear the final administrative appeal.

The DOL has notified the Justice Department of state discrimination in two instances, involving Ohio and Texas. In 1968 the Department of Justice sued the Ohio Employment Service and its director; settlement negotiations continued through the

summer of 1970, fell through, and then were resumed after the appointment of a new director, in January, 1971. Compliance negotiations between the Manpower Administration and the Texas ES have been going on for 6 years, but the Department of Justice has taken no action. (Justice won a significant lawsuit against the Alabama ES and five other state agencies, for discrimination. This was apparently not brought at the prompting of anyone in the Labor Department.32/)

9. Women's Employment Rights. While the federal authorities' campaign to increase the sensitivity of the state employment services to discrimination against racial and nationality-group minorities has produced some results to date, the ES attitude towards another group that has been the victim of severe employment prejudice -- women has been virtually ignored. A civil rights attorney in the Justice Department explained that this is because the Labor Department considers its civil rights mandate to be drawn from Title VI, which bars only racial and ethnic prejudice; policing of ES obligations under Title VII, which does cover discrimination on the basis of sex and religion, is left to Justice and the EEOC.33/

The DOL is responsible for seeing that the Employment Service obeys the law, which includes Title VII. For its budgetary reviews, it should demand the kind of data on service to and employment of women that is now received for Negroes, Spanish-surnamed Americans, American Indians and Orientals. But none of the detailed instructions on serving groups with special employment problems, made available for this study, even refers to the problem of sex discrimination. In fact, a district court recently found that the Texas Employment Service was discriminating against women in its own hiring.34/

The Secretary of Labor has issued a general order banning sex discrimination in DOL enterprises, and regional EEO officers are supposed to check for this in evaluating local ES operations, but they have no enforcement authority to combat it. Bias against women is not covered by Title VI compliance agreements. Other divisions of the Labor Department are concerned with the status of women in the work force, but the ES, the major federal manpower vehicle, apparently is not.

10.

Private Enforcement Efforts. Private individuals have undertaken a major part of the responsibility for initiating court review of ES anti-discrimination obligations. Following EEOC findings of reasonable cause to believe that racial discrimination existed, the NAACP has supported litigation against the employment services in Ohio, Alabama, and Louisiana, and similar suits have been brought in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi. Legal services attorneys in Alabama and in Virginia with the support and assistance of the Employment Project of the Columbia Center for Social Wel

fare Policy and Law, have sued to enjoin certain aspects of services to the disadvantaged that have racially discriminatory overtones, and have brought litigation in Seattle to ban preferential treatment of males under the WIN program. California Rural Legal Assistance, representing a number of MexicanAmerican organizations, has brought suit against the California ES under Title VII, requesting either a fund cut-off or federal takeover of the agency, because of rampant discrimination against the Spanish-speaking.35/

These private efforts have been severely hampered, however, by the unwillingness of the Labor Department to make information on ES performance available to the public. The Fifth Circuit opinion in Carr v. Conoco, F.2d , 1971, makes it clear

that information on referrals and hiring is not confidential, and will be opened to the attorneys in the process of a civil rights suit. But litigation should not be necessary to secure this kind of data. If the Department is unable to commit sufficient resources to its own enforcement efforts and if it is sincere about implementing the rights guaranteed by the Civil Rights laws, it should take every step to facilitate and support the efforts of those in the private sector willing to assume a part of the enforcement burden.

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Approximately 22% of the U. S. population lives in predominantly rural counties. The unemployment rate among this group is not as high as among their urban counterparts, but underemployment reaches 26.5%. This means that more than 25% of these individuals have incomes below federally defined poverty levels. (President's National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty). To put it another way, half of the Americans living in poverty reside in rural areas.36/

The ES offices in rural areas, and the federal manpower programs in general are not meeting the needs of people livving in rural areas. The entire network of ES offices serving farm areas is administered as a separate entity, dominated by agricultural interests, with little interference from either the Department of Labor or the states. The primary goal of ES in farm areas is to meet the needs of the nation's agricultural interests --growers, farmers and processors. The manpower needs of the workers are generally met only to the extent that they coincide with the farmers' needs.

The deficiencies of the rural services have been well documented. In May, 1968, the President's Commission on Rural Poverty took a close look at the ES Farm Labor Services and concluded:

"The manpower services that the employment
service is providing for rural workers are
especially deficient. These services are
nonexistent in some rural communities. Often,
they are most deficient where they are most
needed.

"In addition to low quality of manpower
services in rural areas, a dearth of
usable labor market information, and
the wide disparity and gaps in avail-
able manpower services from urban to
rural areas and even among rural areas,
the manpower service system is frag-
mented." (pp. 26-27)

The Commission report led to a reorganization of the ES Farm Labor Service into the Farm Labor and Rural Manpower Service. Few new staff positions were added and the major attempt to redirect the field offices was a communication informing them that they could use their present farm slots for rural manpower assistance. Since that time, a number of additional organizational changes have been made and a small number of experimental manpower programs have been launched in rural areas, but top-level commitment and substantial resources have been lacking. DOL officials speak of the "turnaround, the shift from placing farm laborers in job orders filed by growers, to the provision of a broad range of job-related services to help the rural poor upgrade themselves. Assistant Secretary Lovell, for example, told Congressmen in May, 1970 that "[F] rom the point of view of providing manpower service, we are saying there is no difference in the needs of rural area residents than urban area residents. It is just harder to reach them." (H.R. Appropriations Subcomm., DOL 1971 Hearings, p. 355).

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But the shift appears to be primarily rhetorical. As one aide put it, "The Secretary doesn't believe in rural poverty; he just discovered Watts." Another DOL official indicated that fundamental changes were impossible as long as the growers continued to dominate: "The rural staff are recruited and proselytised by the growers, they have a separate staff and a separate budget." For example, 1970 was the first year the annual conference for ES rural personnel was not convened jointly with the growers' organization, the National Council of Agricultural Employers.

The Rural Manpower Service division is staffed by 219 persons at the federal level, including those in DOL's regional offices. This represents a staff increase of seven positions since 1965. Locally in the 15 states surveyed,

staff commitments have remained static over the 5 year period, with one or two exceptions, despite repeated assertions by the DOL that they are upgrading this service. (Table F shows the staff allocations for RMS in the 15 states surveyed.) In 1969 the federal manpower budget was $4,215 million; the 1969 grants to states to run farm labor ES offices reached $20,000,000, 6.5% of the total ES grants for that year ($305,981,000).

Despite the fact that the need for employment services in rural areas is far greater than in urban centers where there is a plentitude of private placement resources, many state employment services either do not adequately cover rural areas, or do not provide sufficient management and technical support to their local offices. In Virginia, for example, an investigator for this study visited one threecounty area which covers 1,262 square miles. The area is serviced by an ES staff of four. There is little the staff can do other than make periodic visits to local communities to "keep in touch"; job development is beyond their reach.

1. The Rural Manpower Programs. In FY 1968, only 6.9% of labor and manpower outlays went to rural counties, even though they comprised 22% of the U.S. population. Metropolitan areas received 85% of outlays for 1968 even though their population share was 67%. In 1970, despite repeated pledges to increase rural programs, approximately 7-12% of the manpower funding went to rural programs.37/

As of 1970, the RMS programs designed specifically to assist rural areas continued to represent a minor investment of total manpower funds. They consisted of:

-- an unspecifiable number of MDTA and WIN programs (DOL has net figures on the former and in regard to the latter could show only that 489 of the 901 counties served by the 279 WIN projects were rural or part rural);

13 (out of 82) CEP programs;

10 "Ottumwa" projects funded at $60,000 each for a total of $600,000. These projects, based on a successful experiment in Ottumwa, Iowa, provide the ES with Experiment and Demonstration funds to reorganize its functions on a regional basis. By building up services and resources at a central office, the outlying offices can perform at a higher level than when they operated in isolation;

"Project Hitchhike," funded at $2.5 million, provides minimal seed funding to existing agencies, such as Agricultural Extension Services, to enable them to add a manpower component to their present activities;

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