tenured employment at some future date. The ability of the EEA participants to obtain permanent employment depends on several factors, including (1) the types of jobs the participants are being hired for, (2) the participants' qualifications and the training they receive, (3) the types of agencies the participants are being employed by, and (4) the discretion of the cognizant civil service agency.

Among those program agents which were taking special measures or attempting to work around their systems to accommodate EEA applicants, some were bypassing qualified persons who were on the civil service register in order to hire EEA participants. These program agents would review the register by starting at the top and checking with the listed applicants until they identified EEA eligibles who were unemployed. Persons who were already employed and were seeking different or better jobs were bypassed in the selection.

Although this procedure gave an initial advantage to unemployed applicants for EEA positions, the advantage was limited by the fact that the appointments they received were often provisional. Several of the program agents which hired EEA participants by bypassing other persons continued to carry the EEA participants on their civil service registers. They maintained that the EEA participants could not move to permanent positions until their names reached the top of the registers or until persons occupying higher positions on the register had first been given an opportunity to accept or reject the jobs. In most of these cases, an EEA participant does not acquire any seniority until he moves into a permanent position.

The Massachusetts program agent was experiencing difficulty in promptly hiring participants. To expedite hiring, the local civil service officials agreed to allow agencies to hire participants on a provisional basis without referring to the civil service registers for qualified applicants. The civil service agency plans to screen the registers, however, and it is possible that present EEA participants may be replaced with other eligible applicants who are unemployed and whose names are on the civil service registers.

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In summary, it appears that, for many program agents, civil service or other hiring requirements have presented no impediment to EEA hiring because the program agents have deliberately selected and enrolled applicants who already met, or were likely to readily meet, existing standards. Other program agents have relaxed or altered established hiring procedures to accommodate EEA applicants who might not otherwise be hired. However, EEA enrollees who benefit from these special procedures may encounter problems in the future in obtaining permanent employment. This is especially true of those who have been given a temporary advantage on a civil service register or who have been placed in provisional positions.

We are continuing our examination of the effect that program agents' hiring and civil service requirements had on the operation of EEA and plan to report in more detail on this subject later.

CHAPTER 3

REACHING TARGET GROUPS

Program agents established various priorities for hiring persons to fill jobs under EEA. The majority of program agents had hiring procedures which gave preference to veterans, and some program agents gave preference to veterans who had served in Korea or Vietnam over other veterans. Almost all the program agents stated that they also gave preference to other significant segments of the unemployed, including (1) disadvantaged persons, (2) members of minority groups, (3) welfare recipients, (4) former enrollees in manpower training programs, and (5) persons displaced by technological changes.

A schedule of the characteristics of the EEA enrollees for the program agents included in our review is shown in appendix II. At the time of our review, only 11 of the 25 program agents had achieved the goal of having one-third of the participants consist of Vietnam-era veterans.

Data on the extent of unemployment among the significant segments of the population on a localized basis was generally not available at the program agents we reviewed. We therefore could not determine whether the various groups of unemployed persons, such as young or disadvantaged persons, were being properly represented among those being hired.

ENROLLMENT OF VETERANS

Vietnam-era veterans consitute one of the specified target groups for public service jobs under EEA. Although the legislation did not contain a minimum hiring goal, the Department's guidelines provided for a goal of having Vietnam-era veterans--those who served in the Armed Forces on or after August 5, 1964, and who received other than a dishonorable discharge--constitute at least one-third of all EEA participants. Revised guidelines raised this goal to 40 percent for fiscal year 1973.

The guidelines provided also that all job vacancies, except those to which former employees are being recalled, must be listed with the State employment services and with

other public or private organizations concerned with veteran job placement. The State employment agencies were accorded 48 hours to exclusively recruit and refer eligible veterans before the vacancies were filled from other sources.

Because of the low skill level and pay being offered, it was extremely difficult to enroll veterans in Puerto Rico--only about 2 percent of the enrollees were Vietnam-era veterans. For the other 24 program agents, about 25 percent of the enrollees were Vietnam-era veterans. For 11 of these 24, Vietnam-era veterans constituted about one-third or more of the enrollees.

With the exception of (1) establishing a goal for enrolling Vietnam-era veterans and (2) informing veterans organizations of job openings and having the State employment agencies give 48-hour advance recruitment and referrals for job openings to eligible veterans, generally no special outreach services were afforded to veterans. Goals, when they were reached, appeared to be reached because of specific actions by certain program agents, such as meeting with individual veterans to inform them of available EEA positions and continuing contact with representatives of military installations to inform them of the availability of EEA jobs for soon-to-be-released servicemen. Representatives of these hiring agents stated that, if they had not made special outreach efforts, they would not have been able to enroll their quota of veterans.

Program agent representatives for Massachusetts and Puerto Rico reported that, although a significant number of unemployed veterans were in their jurisdictions, many veterans refused to take EEA jobs because of the low wages and the menial nature of the positions. This appears especially true in Puerto Rico where the hiring agents have geared their programs toward creating a relatively large number of lowpaying, unskilled positions. Although these situations may have worked to the detriment of veterans, they may have been beneficial to that segment of the population--the so-called hard-core unemployed--that would otherwise not have been able to qualify for public employment jobs.

LACK OF LOCALIZED DATA ON UNEMPLOYMENT RATES

Complete and precise data is lacking at local levels on the rates of unemployment among the various significant segments of the population. Because adequate data was not available, program agents were not able to insure that public service employment opportunities were available equitably among significant segments of the unemployed population in relation to the numbers of unemployed persons in each segment.

Most program agents advised us that the data on population, employment, and unemployment which they had included in their applications for funds under the act had been obtained from the State employment security agencies. Program agents reported having problems using this statistical data since it was on a metropolitan-area basis whereas the agents were developing plans for other jurisdictions, such as a county, a city, or certain sections of a county or city.

Program representatives for Detroit told us that, since the characteristics of the unemployed population in terms of significant segments were unknown, they were unable to proportionately select EEA enrollees from the target groups specified in the act. Agents in Massachusetts attempted to achieve proportional enrollments among segments of the unemployed by estimating the size of the significant segments.

Two Department of Labor monthly reports--the Current Population Survey and the labor area summary reports--were the principal sources of unemployment data generally available to program agents. Neither of these reports is suitable for direct use by agents attempting to serve significant segments of the unemployed population in numbers proportionate to their incidence in the total unemployed population.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Handbook of Methods for Survey and Studies states that the Current Population Survey is designed to produce national estimates; it is not designed to produce estimates for States and areas. The Current Population Survey is also available annually for a number of selected locations throughout the country.