MANPOWER ACT OF 1969 MONDAY, APRIL 20, 1970 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR OF THE The subcommittee met at 10:05 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Dominick V. Daniels (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Daniels, Hawkins, Scherle, and Quie. Staff members present: Daniel H. Krivit, counsel; Charles W. Radcliffe, minority counsel for education; Loretta Bowen, clerk; and Cathy Romano, research assistant. Mr. DANIELS. The Select Subcommittee on Labor will come to order. This morning we continue with hearings on pending legislation to establish a comprehensive manpower program to afford an opportunity for employment to every American seeking work, consistent with his skills and potential. Our first witness this morning is Hugh Calkins, Chairman of the National Advisory Council on Vocational Education, accompanied by Dr. Robert Worthington and Dr. Calvin Dellefield, executive director. STATEMENT OF HUGH CALKINS, CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL ON VOCATIONAL EDUCATION; ACCOMPANIED BY DR. ROBERT WORTHINGTON, COUNCIL MEMBER; AND DR. CALVIN DELLEFIELD, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Mr. CALKINS. Mr. Chairman, I regret that Dr. Worthington is delayed in a flight and will be here later. Mr. DANIELS. That is certainly understandable. You may proceed. Mr. CALKINS. We are pleased to testify this morning on what we regard as the most important group of bills before the House at the present time. We testify in qualified opposition to all three of the comprehensive manpower proposals which have been introduced. I say qualified because there are many features about all three of the bills which we warmly endorse. We are very much in favor of the principle of coordination which runs through all three of the bills. We are very much in favor of the principle of planning at the local level for metropolitan areas and at the State levels for areas which are not so densely populated, which is found in Congressman Ayres bill. We believe that there is currently much too much overlapping, duplication, confusion, in the administration of manpower programs. and we are sure that the Congress will want to adopt some kind of legislation which will bring order to the present chaos. The second thing which we feel quite confident of is that there will be in the next few years substantial progress in enlarging the size of our effort to deal with long-term employment. During the sixties we have wrestled with that problem by attacking what we in the advisory council call the pool of unemployed. We have spent $12 billion, are currently spending $12 billion a year in a whole galaxy of programs designed to rescue adults who are unemployed over long periods of time, many of whom are disadvantaged by cultural limitations, health limitations, or education limitations. These programs try to enlist these people in programs, find them jobs, and follow up after they have been employed. We are very much in favor of that approach to what we regard as one aspect of the problem, but we believe that is only an approach to one aspect of the problem and by itself it will never succeed." The reason it will not succeed is that it is a little like trying to clean up the lake you don't want by pumping out the water without damming up the stream that is feeding the lake. The programs that we now have concern themselves with the pool. but they do not concern themselves with the steady flow of young people into the pool, young people who lack the skills and training and background and attitudes that are necessary for employment. One of the things which we now know fairly clearly is that our rather expensive efforts to deal with the problem of the pool of unemployed have not in fact significantly reduced that pool despite the period of rather unprecedented prosperity and the unprecedented tight job market and low unemployment figures which we have enjoyed until very recently in this country. We have in our prepared testimony, which I assume will be a part of the record, done the best we can to collect national figures showing that nationally the pool of long-term unemployed has not declined. I know from figures in my home city of Cleveland that the $15 million spent each year on manpower programs there have not been successful in reducing the pool of long-term disadvantaged unemployed below 23,000 which it was at the beginning of that period. Every year those programs find jobs for something like 8,000 people. of whom something like 4,000 or 5,000 stick with the jobs and seem to be more or less permanently lifted out of the pool. But every year there flows in the pool about the same number of people, a few of them in migrants to Cleveland, but most of them products of the Cleveland school system, most of them dropouts from the Cleveland schools, who come into the market at 17 or 18 without the training skills they need to hold jobs. I think there is widespread recognition that it is not a sensible policy in this country to spend $12 billion dealing with the pool when our effort in dealing with the flow is as small as it is. In our prepared testimony, we try to add up the number of dollars that are spent for the flow, and that is a little difficult, because in a sense all of the Federal moneys that go into education in one way or another, most of them, are directed to this problem of the flow. You could say that Headstart was designed in this direction if you wanted to. But if you look just at the dollars which are specifically targeted on this, the dollars under the vocational amendments, our arithmetic shows there are only about $65 million, a really trifling sum compared to $1 billion of Federal money which is aimed directly at the problem of dealing with the flow. For the most part, we still have the problem of the flow to State and local governments, and for the most part State and local governments don't do a very good job of trying to avoid dumping into the pool every year thousands and thousands of young people who don't have the attitudes and skills that are necessary. Now we believe that perhaps the basic reason why we have not yet. done it, begun to deal effectively with the flow problem in this country is that we have not decided how best to go about doing it. The comprehensive manpower bills which are before you, some of them, propose a method of dealing with that problem, and we do not think that it is a good method. The Ayres bill and the Steiger bill both define as the target population people who are 16 and over. This would be a substantial extension of the present concept of manpower because the present manpower programs in general are targeted at a somewhat older group of people, the people already in the pool of unemployed, but it is clear to those who have worked in the manpower program that we must do something more effective with the 16- to 20-year-old group. We must somehow cut down this flow of young people into the pool, and the proposal as we understand it, at least under two of these bills, is that this be done through the manpower programs. We believe that for the United States to concentrate its efforts at this flow problem through what are now conceived to be manpower programs would be a tragic mistake. We think it would be bad educationally, and we think it would be a terrible waste of a very scare national resource, which is Federal dollars. We think it would be a mistake educationally, because we think it would create essentially a dual educational system. That is, it would create a system in which the public schools, supported largely by State. and local funds, provide career training for those who are pretty successful educationally, for those who are going to go on to college, for those who are going to go on to 2-year community colleges, for those who are going to become technicians, for those who make the grade educationally. For those others those who do not find schooling so easy, there would be a substitute system, run by the Labor Department, run by a local prime sponsor who, under the Ayres bill, would be the mayor, a kind of a backup system for the kids that could not make it in the regular system. Now, I come from a school district in Cleveland where more than half the population is of a minority group, and one of the things I am most aware of is that group of young people have very high goals and ambitions. They have high educational goals and ambitions. In general, the minority people in this country have higher educational aspirations than do the white majority in this country, and to create a system in which we try to deal with unemployment among an urban black population by creating essentially two educational establishments, one for those who make it and one for those who don't, is doomed to fail. There are some minority group young people in Cleveland who are glad to enroll in skill centers and manpower programs at the ages of 16 and 17, but the overwhelming majority of the disadvantaged young people in the city of Cleveland and in every city in this country wan! a high school diploma, or a college diploma, or a certificate from a post-high-school 2-year institution. They don't want a second-class education. If we create a system in which the responsibility for career training for those who will go directly into employment at the ages of 16, 17, 18, or 19, is responsible in a backup system run by the Department of Labor, and the mayor. designed for those who would otherwise be unemployed, it will simply fail. The second reason why we oppose a plan which will create this kind of separate backup system for career training for those who are going directly into employment at ages 16 or 17 is that it is terribly wasteful of Federal money. We now have an educational system in this country in which most of the costs, something like 88 or 90 percent of the costs, are paid by State and local governments. One of the groups whom State and local governments are not serving but who would serve, are those who drop out of school before they graduate. If the Federal Government gets into the business of trying to provide career training for that group of young people, then their entire educational cost will be borne by the Federal Government. Under the Ayres bill, to make the problem even worse, it is mandatory that the Federal Government pay stipends for those who are in training, and if we assume that the training costs will be $1,500 a year and the stipend cost will be $1,500 a year, we have cost of $3,000 for each young person trained, and all of those dollars are Federal dollars. Now by contrast, if we have a system which tries to resolve this very real problem by using the public school system, by using the State and locally supported 2-year institution which pick up then at the end of the 12th grade, by so using the community colleges, we will be using the system in which most of the costs will be paid by State and local governments. I say most of the costs, because it is clear to us that some part of this must be paid by the Federal Government. It simply costs more to provide the kind of career training that a carpenter needs or a machinist needs or a technician needs, or a data processing operator needs than this does to provide the kind of career training that a future teacher needs, and because these additional costs are associated with occupational career training it is essential that the Federal Government, or the State governments, or both, subsidize these extra costs. Moreover, when we try to deal with the disadvantged population, there are additional costs that are involved, and recruiting the young people who have dropped out of school helping them get the kind of basic education and attitudes they need, finding jobs for them, following them up when they are on the jobs, these are the kinds of costs which in the manpower bills programs build up per capita costs to $1,500 or frequently $3,000 and sometimes even $7,000 in some pro grams. If the public school systems and the community colleges are going to deal effectively with the problem of disadvantaged people 16 through 20, they must have substantial Federal subsidies, but Federal subsidies used in that form will go, we calculate, about four times as far as Federal moneys under the Ayres bill or under the Steiger bill. If the Federal Government pays all the costs, it is going to cost the Federal Government something like $3,000 per student. If the Federal Government will say to the community colleges and public school of the country, if you will operate career training programs for young people 16 through 20 who meet disadvantaged criteria, we will pay you the extra cost of those programs, then for every student enrolled the state will make its normal contribution of $750 for or so per pupil, the State and local governments, and the Federal Government will only be called upon to pay the excess over that. If the cost of the program is $1,500 a year, the cost to the Federal Government would be $750, which is 25 percent of the $3,000 it would cost under the O'Hara or the Ayres bill which is the source of my 25percent figure. Federal dollars are scarce. It will be very expensive in this country to deal with the problem of career training for this group of young people who constitute the flow into the pool of unemployment. It is extremely important, in our judgment, that the Federal dollars not be wasted, and it is extremely important that they be used in a way which will draw forth as many State and local contributions as is possible. We are convinced that if the Federal Government will pay the primary resource-not the sole resource, because there are some kids who are so turned off by school that they ought to go to some other institution-but the primary resource for dealing with career training for people 14 to 17 who constitute the flow into the pool of the unemployed, it is going to be the public school system, the secondary institutions and the community colleges. If the Federal Government will say that, the Federal dollars will harness themselves to State and local dollars and together accomplish the job within what the Federal budget will allow. Now in order to make that possible, we propose one injor change in the Ayres bill and the major change is to substitute for the local prime sponsor, who is the mayor in the concept of the Ayres bill, a local agency, the local agency to be composed of the mayor, the superintendent of schools, the president of a community college most concerned with the problem, perhaps a representative of the State employment service, possibly in many communities somebody from the business community or the labor community. That agency would have the responsibility for preparing the local plan, and it would hire a staff which would administer the local plan. The staff would report to the agency. The local plan would have to be approved by the State, by the manpower authorities in the State, and at the Federal Government level |