Mr. TOLBERT. We believe there can be a transfer of information. As you well know, you realize what a drought or a rain can do overnight, or a frost or a hot wind, in the country that you come from, and to properly shift the labor force is something that must be known immediately.

Mr. POAGE. I am not questioning that in the least.

Mr. TOLBERT. We feel that it can be worked out, but we are not smart enough to tell you how to do it. We think that you can put it in the bill, and we will heartily support you.

Mr. POAGE. Do you not think that it is vitally important that we should work that out in any bill that is passed?

Mr. TOLBERT. We certainly do. We want it as badly as you, and we will support it with everything we have.

Mr. POAGE. You do not think the public would support any legislation which might pass here if it were simply a means of allowing a great group of people to draw unemployment compensation at the expense of the Government.

Mr. TOLBERT. We agree

agree with

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Gross.

you 100 percent.

Mr. GROSS. Mr. Tolbert, has the National Farm Labor Conference had a meeting? How do they ever get their ideas together?

Mr. TOLBERT. Mr. Gross, this is a rather loose type of organization made up of a lot of organizations and members, and we have met rather hit-or-miss since the beginning of the war.

Mr. GROSS. When did you have your last meeting?

Mr. TOLBERT. Last Friday and Saturday.

Mr. GROSS. Where?

Mr. TOLBERT. Here, in the Statler Hotel.

Mr. GROSS. Who was at that meeting, for instance?

"

Mr. TOLBERT. There were about 12 or 15 of us represented at the meeting.

Mr. GROSS. By what authority did those men come to that meeting? Whom did they represent?

Mr. TOLBERT. The people that they represented at home sent them. If I may explain a bit, we started meeting last year on this particular piece of legislation. That was last June. At the first meeting there were some 95 or 100 men. We had been sent in by various segments of agriculture from all over the United States.

Mr. GROSS. What prompted that meeting?

Mr. TOLBERT. The extension of the Emergency Farm Labor Act at that time, and the charge that the various Members of Congress had told us we could not go on extending it forever, and if we wanted something permanent we should bring it in.

Mr. GROSS. You met in anticipation of the holding of the emergency agency to set up a plan to carry on.

Mr. TOLBERT. That is right.

Mr. GROSS. I am asking you about these men that got together there. Who authorized them to come in and represent them at the Washington meeting?

Mr. TOLBERT. Their own people.

Mr. GROSS. Were they heads of delegates of recognized farm groups?

Mr. TOLBERT. The same as my organization.

Mr. GROSS. Did the Grange have a delegate there?

Mr. TOLBERT. Yes.

Mr. GROSS. Who?

Mr. TOLBERT. Mr. Fred Bailey.

Mr. GROSS. Are you sure that the delegates at that meeting represented more than two-thirds of the crops that require seasonal work? Mr. TOLBERT. We felt that it represented more than that, and we tried to be conservative in saying two-thirds.

Mr. GROSS. If these labor camps were to be carried on at the expense of the farmers, how would you operate that? Who would manage this, collect the money and look after these camps?

Mr. TOLBERT. I think that I could best answer that, Mr. Gross, by telling you of one of the camps that we are preparing to take over in Oregon at the present time. We are negotiating to buy from the War Assets Administration an air base at Salem, Oreg., and we have formed there what we call the Salem Housing Authority, which is composed of the chamber of commerce, the food processors of the district, and the farmers. Each contributed a third of the money necessary to convert this barracks type housing to family housing, and in turn each group is contributing a third to buy the camp, and in turn each will contribute a third to maintain the camp.

Mr. GROSS. In other words, it will be carried on by a local group? Mr. TOLBERT. Yes.

Mr. GROSS. Why come in for any legislation when the problem can be solved in that fashion?

Mr. TOLBERT. We are not asking for legislation in this bill for camps other than to give us an opportunity to take them over for agricultural groups.

Mr. GROSS. If they are to be sold to somebody who has money to buy them, War Assets will never ask whether it is an agricultural group, or what the group is that wants to use them, or what for. They are going to sell them for money to whoever will and can buy, will they not?

Mr. TOLBERT. That is right, and we are ready to pay money for them. Mr. GROSS. I am trying to get at why this legislation, if the problem can be solved and the property can be acquired by that method, is necessary. This, as it stands today, was an emergency measure. Do you believe that it is necessary to continue these emergency measures and to carry them on? Every agency like that has to fold up. We have people coming in thinking that they should be continued and carried Do you think that the war should go on in that respect?

on.

Mr. TOLBERT. Mr. Gross, we are supporting those parts of the bill which fold up the emergency clauses of the farm labor program. Before the war there was a farm placement service carried on by the United States Employment Service and the local State employment agencies which, according to present legislation, would return to the United States Employment Service and the State employment agencies. We are asking that instead of that being returned to the United States Employment Service and the State employment agencies, such as the present law would require, that that be maintained in the Department of Agriculture and you do away with the emergency phases of the program that were carried on during the war, and in addition we will take over those camps that were maintained at the expense of the Government before the war.

Mr. GROSS. Do you not believe, and has not experience taught you that no matter what type of project it is, it can be carried on more cheaply at the State or local level rather than through a Federal agency?

Mr. TOLBERT. Yes; and that is why we ask that the State extension services handle it rather than an agency here in Washington.

Mr. GROSS. You say on page 3, "The Department of Agriculture was created and is staffed to serve farmers." Further down you refer to this staff as having knowledge of agriculture and that they will be better equipped to give this service.

Now, have you ever gone into any agency anywhere and found that they drew their help on the basis of the knowledge that the help had of the work that they were to do? In other words, if you have an agency that is to handle agricultural labor, do you think that you will have one staffed with people who know the farm problem?

Mr. TOLBERT. We think that the extension service has done more toward that than anyone else. That is why we are asking them to remain in the picture.

Mr. GROSS. I have a personal knowledge of these set-ups. Somebody just has a job. Perhaps they are doing it well, but I have never seen employees of any agency selected on the basis of what they know. It is just exactly like when a man gets an appointment in the Government-it is generally someone that you never heard of, and he is an expert. It is not as though people were selected because of their fitness, their qualifications and their knowledge or ability to serve a set of people. It just does not operate that way.

Mr. TOLBERT. We feel that the extension service has gone further than anyone else in that direction, and that is why we are so heartily supporting the proposition that they stay in the picture raher than be returned to some other agency.

Mr. GROSS. So far as having any agency set up to steer this labor around, it is a fact, is it not, that every night we hear on the radio and read in the press that there is a need for labor here and a need for labor there? We did not have these agencies to do all of these things for farmers and everybody else until a few years ago. Cannot we get back to where we used to be? Do we have to continue these things? Is there need for everything to be so revolutionized now that we need an agency to handle these jobs?

Mr. TOLBERT. They are certainly effective in the local areas, sir. For instance, in Oregon we start our pea harvest in the early spring and draw many of our people from deep down in Colorado, California, and New Mexico.

Mr. GROSS. Exactly. Do you not think down there those fellows do not know when the peas are ready, just as well as you in Oregon? They know in Mexico when you are going to harvest peas and dig your sugar beets. They know in Georgia when we are going to pick peaches in Pennsylvania. Those laborers will pick them in Georgia and then come up to Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York. You do not need staff personnel to do the job.

Mr. TOLBERT. It is in the operation where the staff takes care of that part of the picture, and what we are trying to do is to finish the job. The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Andresen.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I want to supplement what Mr. Poage has said, which is really the big problem before this committee, and that is, on the question of unemployment compensation and other benefits. Now, of course, we want to avoid duplication of activity, as far as the Federal Government is concerned, especially when it comes to paying money out of the Treasury. I hardly think we are on safe ground when we say that men in the United States Employment Service are not able to understand the problems when it comes to the employment of labor because even on this committee we have men who have never been farmers but who have the mentality at least to absorb some of the information with reference to agriculture so that they can legislate intelligently.

How did you get your labor before the war?

Mr. TOLBERT. There was a Farm Placement Service in the United States Employment Service at that time, sir, and it is through the experience that we had during those years in cooperating with the United States Employment Service that today we are asking that this service be left in the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. ANDRESEN. When was the employment service set up in the Department of Agriculture prior to the war?

Mr. TOLBERT. I do not know just when it was established, Mr. Andresen. It was along in the thirties, but I would not be prepared to say just what year it was started. It was very shortly after the creation of the United States Employment Service. I think it was along about 1941 or 1942 that Congress decided that the job was not being handled as it should be by the United States Employment Service and refused to appropriate any more money for farm placement work in the United States Employment Service. And then, either the year following that, or the second year, it was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, and they have been handling it since.

Mr. ANDRESEN. There was a time when the employers of farm labor went out and recruited their own labor.

Mr. TOLBERT. Yes.

Mr. ANDRESEN. They did that prior to the war. Do you think that such a system could be reestablished where the responsibility would fall upon the processors and the farmers to procure their own labor?

Mr. TOLBERT. I would like to point out that much of the recruiting will be done by the growers and the processors themselves. I am not authorized nor prepared to speak for the processors, but as to the farmers, with this program set up, we will continue to do recruiting but it will be done under the direction of this service. They will tell us where the surplus labor supplies are and where we can best do our job of recruiting.

We feel that this organization is only going to serve us with a bare skeleton of information and that the farmers are going to have to bear the brunt of it. We are going to have to recruit these men, transport them, and handle it. The service wil be of immeasurable help to us. It will do away with a lot of competition that we used to have, where everybody felt that all the surplus labor was in one area and were down there carrying on cutthroat recruiting. If we had known more about it, some of us would have been in one part of the country and some of us elsewhere. We would have spread around and not all been fighting in one place. That has been more or less traditional for

years. For years there has been heavy recruiting carried on in Texas. As Mr. Poage can tell you, at times when labor was short, it really got to be a rat race in the surplus area of Texas. Through this program we have been able to level it out, and we feel that we can do even more to level it out with this legislation.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Prior to the war, did you not have a situation where you found a certain amount of transient labor that would travel from place to place as the crops matured?

Mr. TOLBERT. We expect that condition to continue with this program; but, at the same time, before the war we would find there were many areas that would wind up with an awful lot of labor when they would be needed in another area. We feel, through this overall direction, we will level that out so that we will have enough at both places and will not have an oversupply at one place and a shortage at

another.

Mr. ANDRESEN. There are some States-and I refer to my ownwhere the United States Employment Service, or the State employment services, feel that they can handle this matter. We employ quite a bit of seasonal labor in the sugar-beet fields and in the vegetable; canning area. I think the committee, and also the representatives of the various farm groups, should give more consideration to working out an arrangement so that we can avoid this duplication.

Mr. TOLBERT. Mr. Andresen, I would like to point out again that if this program is put into the United States Employment Service and the State employment services, it is an added activity to an already existing Federal and State agency, and if it is left in the Department of Agriculture it will be handled by the Federal Extension Service and the States extension services. It is an added activity to an already existing agency, so we believe there is very little difference as far as the actual mechanics of tying it to one or the other is concerned. We do believe that there is a big difference in the type of service that will be given farmers if it remains in the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. ANDRESEN. How are you going to avoid the duplication of one agency ordering the payment of unemployment compensation where they will not have anything to say about farm employment?

Mr. TOLBERT. Well, we are sincerely in hopes that you can work that in the committee. Our experience was when this program was in the United States Employment Service and in the State employment agencies that we did not get near as many people off the unemployment rolls as we should have, even when it was all in the same house. We are in hopes that it can be worked out so that we will get a lot more of those, but we do not believe from our past experience that you will get the service just because they are in the same house.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I think that is one of the points that the committee will have to work out.

Mr. TOLBERT. We certainly are in hopes that you can work it out, Mr. Andresen, but we do feel rather strongly that just because they are in the same house it will work out, because it did not work out the last time.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Granger.

Mr. GRANGER. As I understand your testimony, it does not contemplate any importation of foreign labor.