THE EMPLOYMENT AND MANPOWER ACT OF 1972 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1972 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR OF THE Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to recess, at 10 a.m., in room 2261, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Dominick V. Daniels (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Daniels, Veysey, and Steiger. Staff members present: Daniel H. Krivit, counsel; and Dennis Taylor, minority associate counsel. Mr. DANIELS. The Select Subcommittee on Labor will come to order. We will continue with our hearings on manpower legislation pending before the committee. Our first witness this morning is Mr. George Autry, executive director of the North Carolina Manpower Development Corp., of Chapel Hill, N.C., and I understand he is accompanied by Bob Smith, director of planning. You may proceed, Mr. Autry. STATEMENT OF GEORGE B. AUTRY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NORTH CAROLINA MANPOWER DEVELOPMENT CORP., CHAPEL HILL, N.C., ACCOMPANIED BY BOB SMITH, DIRECTOR OF PLANNING, PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT AND PUBLIC INFORMATION, AND TOM FAISON, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, PLANNING, PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT AND PUBLIC INFORMATION Mr. AUTRY. Mr. Chairman, also with me is the assistant director of planning, Mr. Tom Faison. With your permission, I will summarize my statement and ask that the entire statement, together with the appendix you have, be inserted in the record. Mr. DANIELS. Without objection, it will be so ordered. (The statement and appendix referred to follow :) STATEMENT OF GEORGE B. AUTRY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NORTH CAROLINA MANPOWER DEVELOPMENT CORP. Mr. Chairman, thank you for your invitation to the North Carolina Manpower Development Corporation to testify on pending manpower legislation. As Executive Director, I am pleased to accept your invitation. The North Carolina Manpower Development Corporation is a private, nonprofit corporation created in 1967 by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Office of Economic Opportunity with the assistance of The North Carolina Fund. Over the years, we have been funded by three private foundations, grants and contracts from three federal agencies, with support from the State of North Carolina and North Carolina business and industry. Our Board Chairman is Luther Hodges, Jr., Executive Vice President of North Carolina National Bank. The Board is composed of 27 members, nine of whom represent business and industry in North Carolina, nine of whom are academic experts and representatives of State and Federal agencies, and nine of whom represent the poor of North Carolina. MDC, as we generally refer to ourselves, was founded with three major goals. I will discuss two of these goals briefly to introduce our organization and give you some idea of the scope of our work. Our third corporate goal relates more closely to my appearance before you today. Our first goal was to involve industry directly in developing solutions to the manpower process. We have gone about this task by involving our Board and industrial advisory councils not only in job development, but in the identification of manpower problems and the development of solutions to those problems. Our second goal was to act as an experimental and demonstration agency which would attempt to devise new solutions to manpower problems which existing agencies have neither the time nor money to tackle. In other words, our job is to serve as a laboratory for those agencies, spinning off to them any successful programs we devise. One example of this function is MDC's creation of a prevocational training package geared to the needs of displaced farm workers, school dropouts, blacks and Indians, and others who had no history of, or orientation to, employment with industry. As this program was refined in prototype training centers, it was tested in one of North Carolina's fifty-six community colleges. In 1971, the North Carolina General Assembly appropriated funds to begin expansion of the program throughout the State's community college system to reach, train, and develop jobs for the people who need its services the most. Other examples include an intra-state Mobility Project whose purpose is to change traditional migration patterns which have sent North Carolina's rural poor to the ghettos of the North by assisting them in relocating instead to cities in North Carolina. We are also serving as prime sponsor for an experimental six-county rural Concentrated Employment Program. We have been developing a computerized job bank and job-matching system designed to complement the system developed by the United States Department of Labor. The eventual home of these projects will, I hope, be the Employment Service of North Carolina. (If the Subcommittee likes, I would be happy to mention other projects or expand on what we have learned from those I mentioned.) Our third corporate objective was to create a state manpower model. That is, construct for one state an ideal system for the comprehensive delivery of manpower services which might be copied in other states. If the Subcommittee finds this goal inordinately presumptuous for an organization which was intended to be temporary, I believe the Subcommittee will also recognize that all of us in the "manpower field" were a little presumptuous in 1967. LACK OF NATIONAL POLICY As far as I can tell, there was no manpower policy prior to the 1960's, nor any manpower programs. I define "manpower policy"-artificially and arbitrarily so as to distinguish it from occupational education-as the figuring out of what to do with the products of an educational system that has failed to meet the needs of a goodly portion of our citizens or the waste products of a dynamic economy. The employment service was. at that time-and to a large extent still is— exactly what it was intended to be: a public employment service. It was not intended to be a poverty program; and my view is that we who claim to be manpower experts confuse the issue by pointing out so often and so well that the employment service has not done what it was not intended to do and what it has had neither the funds nor the expertise to do. In the 1960's, we had no manpower policy but an increasing variety of manpower programs. To say that some of these programs did not work at all, that some of them did not work very well, that none of them were perfect, does not say very much either. I believe that Congress, as well as this Administration and the last Administration and the Department of Labor, has done about as good a job as could have been expected. Now, at what I think is the proper time, you are turning your attention to creating for the first time a national manpower policy on the basis of the country's experience with various program experiments or categorized attempts at training to solve our problems. In this light, we can look constructively at what happened in the 1960's to see what can be learned. What I think every member of the Subcommittee has already agreed on is that the haphazard creation of a variety of programs resulted in a quasipolicy where one was not intended, and that quasi-policy does not make much sense. Everyone agrees that some form of decentralization and decategorization is necessary because we know that the problems in Montana are not the same as the problems in North Carolina or in New York City. Of course, we knew this all along. Yet because states and local governments had not responded to the manpower needs of their people, the federal government had no choice but to go through a period of Washington-imposed solutions. Unfortunately, the lack of a national policy was, in the short run, almost counter-productive. It generated conscious and unconscious discrimination against the rural poor who constituted the biggest problem of the 1960's. The Test Cities Program, the Fifty Cities Program, to a large extent CEP, were fire extinguishers for cities bloated by migrants from rural poverty. But for each job placement these programs produced, we in North Carolina sent you another displaced farm worker or an impoverished mountaineer-people the cities did not need, people who exacerbated the problems of the cities, people who should have been developed as previous human resources by North Carolina. Rural areas would appear to be getting a fairer shake today if you look only at existing legislation and agency guidelines. The problem is still there, however; and it would be continued, in varying degrees, by legislation pending before this Subcommittee as well. I say that for the following reasons: 1. Manpower funds are generally allocated on the basis of population and reported unemployment. Yet unemployment is not the major problem in North Carolina. Most of our rural poor work, but they can find work only sporadically at the low wages that small farmers can afford to pay. 2. Expertise is lacking at the local level. At last count, North Carolina's largest city. Charlotte, had some twenty manpower programs, while Planning Region R, composed of ten predominantly rural counties in the Northeastern part of the State, did not have a single Manpower Development and Training Act project. More than anything else, this imbalance results from sophisticated project planners and funding specialists in Charlotte and none in Region R. 3. Manpower programs are conceived in Washington by people of an urban orientation, and the programs are designed for the most part to meet urban needs. 4. There is a lack of obvious program agents in rural areas where local government is not complex. Therefore, with the exception of the community colleges and technical institutes in our State, there are fewer obvious sponsors available for programs than there are in urban areas. All of these are problems which federal legislation and national policy should comprehend. Nevertheless, they are real and present problems for North Carolina and problems that North Carolina must face no matter what the federal response. Therefore, MDC realized rather quickly after its founding that the creation of a "State-wide manpower model" was not our first priority. A state policy would have to come first; and before a state policy could be devised, a vehicle for devising it would have to be established. MDC did not see itself, a nonprofit corporation purposefully temporary in nature, as the proper vehicle. Rather, that vehicle would have to be a product and a part of State government. DEVELOPING A STATE POLICY In 1969, our Board Chairman, Mr. Hodges, and Governor Robert W. Scott discussed the State's manpower problems generally. The MDC staff was asked to make specific recommendations for state-wide manpower policy development. For over a year the staff talked to manpower specialists, academic experts, and agency heads in North Carolina and around the country about the problem. In early 1971, we submitted a report to the Governor. On the basis of that report, Governor Scott proposed, and the General Assembly created, a State Manpower Council. Backed up with its own staff funded by the General Assembly, and with the aid of the CAMPS staff, the Council began its work on January 6 of this year. The Council is composed of twelve North Carolinians representing the business. 73-737-72-54 industry, and academic communities as well as organized labor and the poor. The Chairman is my boss, Luther Hodges, Jr., and the Vice Chairman is Dr. Juanita Kreps, an economist and Dean of The Woman's College, Duke University. No agencies are represented; rather, they serve as members of an Advisory Council. By statute the State Manpower Council is charged with: 1. Developing a policy and a state plan; 2. Advocating that policy to the General Assembly, Congress, and federal and state policy-making institutions; 3. Coordinating state manpower and manpower-related programs; and 4. Acting as state sponsor of federal manpower programs in North Carolina. Although the MDC Board originally hoped that we would create a manpower model which could be emulated in other states, it is now clear to us that North Carolina's structure for creating the model may be good only for North Carolina. The North Carolina Manpower Council is the product of exhaustive MDC research, the advice of the most knowledgeable experts, and the wisdom of the Governor and our legislature. FLEXIBILITY NEEDED The political history, the governmental organization, and the structure of manpower-related agencies differ from state to state. In recognition of these differences, my first plea today is that the legislation you draw allow each state flexibility to attack its own problems in its own way within the framework of broad national policy. Three elements in North Carolina's manpower picture are examples of why flexibility is needed. North Carolina's new State Manpower Council shocks some of our friends in other states by its mandate to be a planner, coordinator, promoter and even prime sponsor of programs. But this is the option that seems best for North Carolina. Although we wish it on no one else, we believe there should be leeway in federal legislation for a state to make such a choice. Our community college system is another distinctive element in North Carolina's plans. The system's fifty-six community colleges and technical institutes, which are located within commuting distance of 95 percent of our population, are the prime deliverer of manpower training in the State. They are open-door institutions with programs for all, regardless of previous educational achievement. They constitute a system which grew up entirely after the 1954 Brown decision and thus have no history of institutionalized discrimination. Last year, 358,000 men and women were enrolled in the system. North Carolina should be allowed to use this distinctive system to provide manpower training as North Carolina sees fit. North Carolina's Employment Service, on the other hand, closely resembles the Employment Service in most other states. It is an Employment Service which is told by the federal government to do outreach, which is greatly needed in some areas of North Carolina but not in others. It is an Employment Service which is told in one year by one Administration to emphasize services to the disadvantaged, in another year by a different Administration to emphasize services to returning veterans, and in another year by the same Administration to emphasize employer relations-all worthy goals but unaccompanied by the resources necessary for reaching the goals. It is an Employment Service which, I understand, will shortly be asked to register recipients of food stamps in depressed areas of a state where there would be no necessity for food stamps if any jobs were available. What North Carolina needs is not a federalized Employment Service, but an Employment Service that is responsive to the needs and responsible to the direction of the State. The Employment Service should obviously perform its functions within the confines of national policy, but national policy must be clearly defined. The manpower ramifications of an H.R. 1 or a WIN program need to be coordinated as much with state manpower policy as do MDTA projects. THREAT OF GEOGRAPHIC FRAGMENTATION My second plea is that we not replace the present program fragmentation with geographical fragmentation. If we are going to move from fragmented hit-andmiss categorical programs to a rational, decentralized manpower system, federal legislation must allow those states with the will and the capacity a much larger role than they have played up to now-a much larger role than many legislative proposals would allow them in the future. As prime sponsor for a six-county rural CEP, we have found, first hand, that coordinated attacks on manpower problems suffer when those attacks must be carried out by localized agents whose programs are not part of a comprehensive, broad-based plan. In a loose association, such as CAMPS, individual program sponsors naturally tend to emphasize services and projects that produce the highest yield in the shortest time. As a result, the sum of individual efforts over a region or a state can-and often does-neglect or ignore problem areas that should be high priority concerns. Our experience convinces us that there must be a broad base for planning and program development so that manpower reform legislation can eliminate this geographic fragmentation as well as program fragmentation. We believe the ideal way to get the base we need is by utilizing "the state" as a basic unit of manpower planning. There is a strong case for this approach. States like North Carolina already fund and direct the vital services and institutions that deliver key manpower services. They have unique authority to act. And they are situated so they can use their authority and institutional resources to assure that a manpower system develops the mix of programs and services that can get at root causes of manpower problems missed by localized programs. Let me go back to the rural poor as a case in point of where an effective statebased system would pay dividends. MDC's experience in running prototype training centers in North Carolina's urbanized Piedmont and our study of programs in urban areas of other states showed us how local programs inevitably had an urban focus. Individually and collectively they could not come to grips with the needs of thousands upon thousands of men and women who had fled rural poverty without the skills to hold or even to seek decent jobs in urban areas. Migration has eased in recent years. But it will continue. The latest available national figures (1969) show that one-half of the poor still live outside of urban areas, and the poorest of the poor still live in rural counties. So the move to the city still has its attractions-however illusory. And the push of job-displacing mechanization in agriculture still makes migration seem necessary even to many men and women who would rather stay put. It is vain to expect the areas that spawn these migrants to take the lead in coping with their shortcomings. The areas themselves contribute to these shortcomings-through their weak tax bases, poor schools, inadequate health facilities, declining job opportunities, and leadership which too often reflects the demoralization such conditions breed. Coping with such a fundamental problem that cuts across many local boundaries is a job for the state. DESIGN FOR A STATE-BASED SYSTEM Let me outline how we think this job can be done. The key is to establish clearcut state and local responsibilities that meet the legitimate needs of both levels and mesh to produce a state-wide system for planning and delivery of manpower services. Our efforts to design a model system for North Carolina convinced us that the planning component, at least, must be tied to a central authority at the state level-the Governor, his designated agent, or an agency established by state statute. To develop a coordinated plan for the entire state, this central authority must have a state-level planning capacity; it must have authority to see that the entire state is divided into local planning and program districts; and it must have some authority for program sponsorship if no local sponsor can or will provide a service called for by the state plan. This state-level development would not and should not preclude local planning or even independent local prime sponsorship. But independent prime sponsors must be limited to cities and counties of sufficient size-say 150,000 or more population—to command the expertise for effective independent administration. And local plans must be integrated into a state-wide plan regardless of whether they are developed for independent sponsors or state-designated districts. If prime sponsors object to modifications which the state plan would work into their local plans, they could appeal to the Secretary of Labor. The Secretary would have authority to resolve the dispute. This process would promote comprehensive state planning by forcing local areas to comprehend the broader manpower picture and by forcing the state to recognize urban problems. It would intensify the state's commitment to provide local areas with services through state agencies and institutions. It would also involve the state in efforts to override tricky problems that confront geographi |