4. The workweek in U.S. industry, as measured by the seasonally adjusted average hours worked weekly by production workers, hit lows of 40.2 hours in 1952, 39.5 in 1954, and 38.2 in 1960-61. The next recession may well be worse than the last three by all measures. These four examples illustrate a necessity for a rapid rate of economic growth. These facts must not be forgotten merely because some of the economic indicators now seem to be pointing upward again. It is true that according to some methods of calculation some of these figures can be disputed. For example, the downturn period of the current recession lasted 8 months, the same length as the 195758 recession, compared with 13 months for the 1953-54 decline and 11 months for the 1948-49 downturn. So it could be argued that by some measures our business cycles are not becoming more serious. On the other hand, the overall statistics tend to obscure the disproportionately high unemployment rates among all minority groups, handicapped workers, older workers, unskilled workers, and those in special areas of chronic, long-term economic decline.

These arguments over statistics should not be allowed to overshadow either the individual human problems or the broad, international implications of our apparent inability to maintain full and steady employment for those of our people who are willing and able to work.

Second, there is cause for alarm in the tendency to be content with an ever-growing acceptable minimum level of unemployment. Hardly anyone in this country today will admit publicly that even 3 percent unemployment is attainable, although this was widely accepted only about 5 years ago. Now it has become popular to advocate returning to 4 percent as a goal, although this is at least 1 million more unemployed people than the history of this country indicates is a reasonable and attainable minimum. Meanwhile, the official figures are challenged by many for understating the level of actual unemployment.

Deplorable as these trends may seem, the future promises little relief. The National Planning Association, a well-known and highly respected independent economic research organization, supported by many leading management leaders, as well as university and union representatives, calculated in April 1961 that by 1962 it will be possible to attain today's production levels with 1.8 million fewer workers than are employed now, at the bottom of this recession.

In the next 10 years 26 million new, young workers will enter the job market, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. This is not based on any theoretical projection of population growth. These people are already born and are in school. By merely applying normal mortality rates to that number we have a highly accurate forecast of the number who will be in need of jobs and the number is alarmingly high when compared with the most optimistic forecasts of available jobs.

It is true that these facts concerning an apparent tendency toward an increasing severity of business cycles and a decline in employment opportunities cannot be attributed entirely to automation or technological changes. Until we achieve full production and see how many workers are still unemployed, we have no basis for even estimating the effects of recent automation on employment. But the traditional argument against excessive unemployment has been that it is due to an insufficiency of economic growth. The economy should be vital

enough to provide a rapid enough rate of growth to absorb all workers who desire employment and who have been displaced by technological changes.

If we are to look at the serious problem of unemployment in its total setting, and not just as one cycle out of many, then a more rapid rate of economic growth could be expected to solve this problem of excessive unemployment and displacement. Consequently there would be less need for Government spending on retraining since private industry could be expected to carry more of the cost. This is because there would be a higher expected profit from industrial production and also there would be a relative labor shortage. Hence private industries. would both need and be able to finance their own retraining in order to secure the skilled employees they need. Many workers now unemployed would be able to secure employment without retraining first.

The success of retraining programs also requires a higher rate of economic growth. Unemployed workers are reluctant to accept retraining programs if they see no jobs at the end of them. Thus the recession has adversely affected the success of retraining plans such as the one negotiated by Armour & Co. and the Meatpackers Union. An insufficiency of economic growth has caused many unions to seek a shorter workweek as their only protection in the short run against increasing unemployment because they have no control over the overall rate of economic growth. Yet a more rapid rate of economic growth would permit them to encourage more production and hence employment, which is generally considered both desirable and necessary in this period of international economic competition.

Finally it can be expected that some of the cost of sound tax-supported retraining programs will be offset by savings in unemployment compensation and relief expenditures now incurred to support the unemployed.

THE INCREASE IN STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT

Many carefully conducted case studies have shown that while younger displaced workers could often find new employment, and some actually benefit from being forced out of deadend jobs and into better opportunities, for at least three other classes of workers there is usually only tragedy. These are older workers, women, and minority groups. One study, conducted incidentally before the present recession made new jobs much harder to find, showed older workers (over the age of 45) were out of work an average of 6 months (compared to 3 months for all workers together) and 82 percent used up all their unemployment compensation before finding other, often lower paying jobs. Most of those over 60 years of age never found another job and had to retire into dependency on others or social security. All of the women exhausted their unemployment compensation benefits and only half ever found other jobs. Many of these were at lower skills and wages. Negroes also fared badly. While the average wage cut of all those workers who found new jobs was 9 cents an hour, Negroes on the average had a wage cut 50 percent greater than this. In early 1961, unemployment of white men was 7.2 percent; for nonwhite men, 14.7 percent; for white women, 6.4 percent; for nonwhite women, 12.5 percent.

Problems like this are not likely to ease as the percentages of older people and Negroes rise and the number of women seeking employment increases. The U.S. Department of Labor expects a 70-percent increase in people over the age of 70 by 1975 as against a 17-percent increase in those of the 25 to 44 or prime-of-life age group. Negro birth rates exceed those of whites, and the percentage of women seeking employment is also rising.

Furthermore, it should be recognized that there is a large amount of technological displacement in rural areas due to a combination of (1) the mechanization of farms; (2) the decline of agricultural markets; and (3) the higher birth rate in rural areas. Figures from the U.S. census show that the 1960 farm population was 15,635,000 in comparison to a 1950 farm population of 25,058,000. While there is some difference in the way the Census Bureau determined who was to be included as a part of the farm population, it is obvious that a much smaller number of persons were employed in agriculture in 1960 than in 1950, while total agricultural production increased enormously. No matter how skilled a farmer might have been as a farmer, in most cases he became an unskilled city worker when he moved to town and either replaced an unskilled city worker or added to the accumulation of unskilled workers. Although the technological advances and changes resulting from automation in agriculture have been tremendous in the last 10 years, there is every indication that there will continue to be a rapid rate of technological change in the

future.

It is stretching language and compressing reality to say that semiskilled operators can easily become highly skilled technicians. It is equally doubtful that the tremendous reduction in clerical jobs, held mostly by women, that office automation has caused will lead to expanding opportunities for women elsewhere. Nor will the higher rate of displacement of unskilled minority groups necessarily ease their upward mobility into skilled or professional jobs. Automation does not upgrade people, only their jobs. This vital distinction highlights the crucial transitional problem.

Some studies indicate that automation does not even increase the maintenance force significantly except during the "debugging" period and except for electrical maintenance. Newly automated plants frequently hire inexperienced workers and give them only limited training. Some case studies show that former machine operators tend, after automation, to become only machine monitors. They rarely have to actually do anything but they must be constantly alert. Other evidence points to job enlargement but this is often in the form of a requirement that the operator be responsible for more complicated machinery or for a greater variety of machinery rather than requiring more intensive knowledge of the workers.

Automation has apparently proceeded slowly enough so far to allow normal turnover to disguise some of its effects. For example, a manufacturer of TV sets studied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, showed no employees laid off as a result of automation. In fact, new job classifications and new machinetending jobs were created. But he took advantage of a high turnover of women workers and simply cut back his hiring when automation

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began. Therefore, the problem becomes not the worker who is fired but the worker who is not hired. This has been called silent firing.

In the United States today the white collar or clerical work force is larger than the blue collar or factory work force. As former Secretary of Labor James Mitchell said recently, "In the telephone industry, automation has reached a point where, for all practical purposes, the companies regard themselves as 'strikeproof.'" The same is true of many utilities. In varying degrees this same trend has manifested itself in different industries.

If automation is to benefit individual working people it will have to be largely through its effect on raising living standards in the national economy and not through its impact on the plant. Physical working conditions are undoubtedly improved but there is no other definitely established benefit to workers in the automated plant. Job opportunities in factory production have been substantially reduced. For the most part, overall economic growth will probably have to provide the economic environment in which new entrants to the work force and the victims of silent firing, such as forced job transfers, will be able to find opportunities for employment. The national economy must grow fast enough to maintain plenty of new job opportunities for workers displaced by automation. Major emphasis should be on the need for a really full employment and dynamic economy. To accomplish this, priority must be given to removing the anomaly of excess capacity existing alongside human suffering and unemployment. This can be done only by restoring a sufficiency of employment. But, above all, the obvious and highly publicized advantages of automation should not be allowed to overshadow the plight of the little man searching for a place in a growing economy.

We need much more broadly based concepts of unemployment than we now have. This country can no longer afford the haphazard way in which people have normally found their way into jobs. We cannot afford to allow such a high percentage of our workers to drift aimlessly into the blind alleys of obsolete occupations or fall accidentally into the jobs that will determine the course of their life. There is a vast, untapped need for more education of all kinds and for much more counseling.

PROBLEMS OF AN AUTOMATED ECONOMY

Since the great depression, there has been a growing realization that there is no automatic regulator that guarantees full employment. The enormous costs of unemployment of all resources-but particularly labor-have been well documented. People are not like machines or ore deposits. Human resources normally depreciate with time rather than use and they wear out at an accelerated rate when they are unemployed because of the decline of knowledge and skills. The main economic cost of unemployment is in production that is permanently lost. Yet the social costs of unemployment far exceed even the economic costs, since unemployment also contributes in large measure to crime, disease, family disintegration, race and religious prejudice, and suicide.

In the highly specialized, high-speed, and interdependent economy of today the costs of large economic fluctuations are high. The industrialist must maintain expensive inventories and hedge against

price changes, if possible, or else risk loss or bankruptcy. The consumer-saver risks inflation, which erodes away the real value of his wealth and income, or deflation, which cuts off his livelihood. However, the worker who lives from day to day usually suffers first and most acutely when his source of income is cut off by unemployment. It is now a clearly recognized responsibility of businessmen and the Government, since they are the basic economic decisionmakers in the country, to insure as high and stable a level of production and employment as possible.

We can no longer view recession as medieval Europe viewed the plague as an inevitable turn of fate to be accepted with despair. There is no more reason to accept such great cyclical swings in output, or ever-rising levels of structural unemployment, than to accept an epidemic of smallpox. In the case of these economic diseases, as well as these ancient physical diseases, the causes are well known and the remedies are effective when properly applied. Without built-in stabilizers our modern industrialized and automated economy would tend toward ever greater fluctuation and instability. Large enterprises, high fixed costs, and the necessity for continuous operation of industry magnify the adverse consequences of shutdowns. Furthermore, prosperity itself is a potential threat to continued stability. The abundance of production which increases living standards also frees people from spending all their incomes unless they so desire. Whenever basic necessities can be secured by most people with only a part of their incomes, full employment and stability become precarious because prosperity is then sustained by that portion of total spending which is dependent on confidence rather than physical needs. A prosperous economy is always potentially unstable in the sense that small changes in expectations can have magnified effects.

Yet there are reasons why our economy need not retain the tolerance for recessions that it has shown in the past. It is contrary to both logical commonsense and humane considerations that millions of men should rust in idleness while they, and others, lack the goods they are capable of producing. Sheep may be marched, without protest, to slaughter, even though they can look ahead and see the results at the end of the line, but people have an instinctive sympathy for others and will fight to save them, not only from humane considerations but because they can see that they, themselves, may be next.

Furthermore, both major political parties have generously accepted the praise offered for prosperity, where they could, and have freely blamed the other party for unemployment. While the credits and blames may have been misplaced the public has concluded from such arguments that recessions and unemployment are indeed controllable. The only remaining question would seem to be whether we must always wait until after a crisis is upon us (so that programs are hastily planned and executed and hence relatively ineffective) or whether we can develop a program and facilities set up in advance to meet the time of need.

THE PRESENT URGENCY

It is not as though there were no need for the talents of these unemployed. The unfilled needs of the economy are staggering to the imagination. Our cities of over 50,000 have received 84 percent of