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as international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers for a 4-year period.

For 17 years prior to becoming international president I served as general vice president with responsibility for the IAM in a nine-State area, with headquarters in Chicago, Ill.

My purpose here today is to advise that the AFL-CIO approves of and is cooperating with the National Alliance of Businessmen in their mission of finding jobs for the hard core unemployed and underemployed.

President Johnson, in his state of the Union message in 1968 called upon the business community to assume the responsibility of finding useful employment for a substantial number of our citizens, sometimes referred to as the hard core, who then and even more so at the present time, are having great difficulty in finding meaningful employment.

It is not my intention here to go into reasons for the existence of the hard core or to even justify the efforts of the National Alliance of Businessmen in their handling of the mission assigned to them first by President Johnson and now by President Nixon.

It is my intention, however, to advise you that the American Trade Union movement is supporting and working with the National Alliance of Businessmen in its endeavor.

The AFL-CIO executive council, of which I was a member, after reviewing the program of the National Alliance of Businessmen, endorsed the program and unanimously agreed to cooperate with it.

Two of the principal reasons for the support of the AFL-CIO executive council are:

First, we considered it a meaningful program that would bring into the workforce unemployed people and so some unemployed people who had previously been considered unemployable.

The program would bring these people into the workforce, make of them tax producers in place of tax eaters, and help in fulfilling the policy of the U.S. Government as stated in the Truman Administration-that of a full employment of the American workforce. Further we could bring these unemployed people into the workforce without reducing the standards or conditions of employment negotiated into the agreements between the trade union movement and the employers of America.

It would provide these workers with the status of a regular employee: job security and conditions of employment guaranteed by the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement identification with all the other new hires; and the same opportunity for advancement or upgrading according to the seniority they accrue over periods of time.

Secondly, the trade union movement felt that the business community was recognizing its responsibility to find jobs for citizens, who previously had been denied the opportunity of employment by changing the requirements for entry level jobs within the industry and providing additional training for what deficiencies he or she may have.

Let me give you an example of what I mean, which should explain better than any other way that I can think of. A few

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years ago, when Federal Judge, Otto Kerner, was Governor of Illinois, he appointed a broad based committee of citizens of Illinois to make a study to find out what it would take to provide full employment for the workforce of Illinois.

This committee was chaired by Frank Cassell of Inland Steel. Among others serving on the committee was the present Secretary of Labor, George Shultz, and a senior vice president of the Nation's largest airline whose general offices are in Chicago.

I also served on the committee.

During the committee discussions, I was told by the senior vice president for industrial relations of this airline that it was the policy of the airline to only hire new employees who had finished high school, as any employee hired should have educational ability to advance up the ladder to all of the positions in the airline's work force.

You can readily see that this policy would have automatically disenfranchised practically all of those that we refer to as the hard core.

This same airline today is participating in the program of the National Alliance of Businessmen. It has reduced its qualifications for new hires so that opportunities are being found for the hard core. To the best of my knowledge, the program is proving successful, but it does require additional training on the part of the company that would have been or not even been available just a short time ago.

This employer, the Nation's largest airline, can be multiplied many times over by other employers that are now voluntarily cooperating with the National Alliance for Businessmen and are participating in hiring the hard core, and who I don't think would have hired any if it had not been for this commitment of the business community.

The American Trade Union Movement does support this endeavor of the National Alliance of Businessmen and all other endeavors to find jobs, while protecting the provisions of collective bargaining agreements, that go towards fulfilling the stated policy of the United States that of full employment.

In closing, allow me to thank you for the opportunity of presenting the position of the AFL-CIO, as expressed by its executive council.

Senator CRANSTON. First I would like to express my appreciation of the National Alliance of Businessmen in trying to make this effort succeed. It is important that the business community be involved, and business has devoted time and money and executive positions to this work.

It is obviously most laudable.

The concepts of involving the business community in new ways of providing employment for the disadvantaged, and better jobs for those people on a voluntary basis, is a great one, and I hope that we can make it work.

I have some real questions as to what has been happening so far, and I think a major problem is that we don't really know exactly what has been happening in an overall sense.

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Money has been obligated and spent for a number of different programs, or jobs, and we on this committee need to understand and explore just what has been happening, what the expenditures have achieved in terms of the program objectives.

Two administrations have been involved in this, one in its origins, and one now in the implementation, and many decisions made by the prior administration obviously have thus far had considerable effect upon what this administration has been able to accomplish. So we are really looking at the overall problem, and not being critical of one administration or the other in seeking to understand what is happening and what remedies may be in order.

The present administration has made some promises, which I think were rather extravagant, in terms of what would accomplished in this program. These claims became quite important because. about 1 year ago, at a time when Senator Nelson and I and other members of this subcommittee and the Congress generally did battle with the Labor Department to prevent the abrupt and arbitrary closure of 59 job corps centers we failed in that effort-some very deep commitments were made by this administration in regard to the JOBS program, looking to this as a substitute for what had been undertaken through the Job Corps.

17,500 enrollees were put out of the Job Corps at that time and one of our questions is did the JOBS program take up the slack and provide substitute opportunities for those people?

I think we have to measure the accomplishments partly against those promises of a year ago. We must explore how large a role and what role of this kind of a private program, subsidized in part by the Federal Government, should play in future manpower efforts.

We have, obviously, great difficulties, and you have great difficulties trying to make it work at a time of rising unemployment when even highly skilled people are out of work.

We have in my State, highly trained executives and engineers out in the streets because of cut backs in Defense and Aerospace, and how a program like this can work, when you have a million more unemployed now than we had a year ago is, of course, a very great question.

I want to thank the chairman and the staff of this committee for the very fine work they did in preparing the staff study of the JOBS program, making material available to us for study prior to these hearings.

I think we can agree that the layoff of workers brought on board with the promise of career development to be most unfortunate, and there seems to have been a great deal of such laying off occurring. Failures to provide real jobs and supportive services have the effect of disillusioning young people and others who entered this program with high hopes and then found themselves out in the streets at the end of their efforts.

As you know, Mr. Wilson, the slogan of the NAB JOBS program is "Hire, train and retain."

I assume the emphasis is on the retain, and that the basic principle of the program is that the participants are hired from the day they enter the program.

A program that resulted in people not being hired for jobs would be a violation of the contract, or at least the spirit of the program, would it not?

Mr. WILSON. If they have a contract and don't hire at all, I would assume yes. Except that conditions change; there have been companies that find it is necessary to cut back, and I might point out these are the facts of life in trying to get the people in the mainstream, and if they have their seniority rights, they have the same rights as anybody else.

I mentioned the young man who said, I hope I will be called back soon. We hope this is not going to continue too long, but everyone gets a crack-even with nonunion, most of them have seniority rights, and they move in, and they have a very valuable right.

Senator CRANSTON. To cite an example of the thing that has occurred in some instances that gives grave concern to me, last Friday, after a case had been aired in the newspapers. the Labor Department canceled a $1 million contract involving 19 dry cleaning firms in Dallas, Tex.

They said most of the persons in the program had not been hired by the dry cleaning shops as required in the contract, but were enrolled as students, and were paid out of Federal funds.

This program began in December 1969, and was canceled in May 1970. The program ran 8 months without the trainees having a job. What's your opinion of that sort of operation?

Mr. WILSON. First of all, this is not our job, and I probably should not even comment on it. The task given to us was to find the jobs. We do not have anything to do with the monitoring, or the actual contract itself.

Let me say in connection with this, and I studied very carefully the subcommittee report, and I have a very violent disagreement with some of it. If you want to take this, an urgent program of this type, with all of the complexities in organizing and setting up, you can sit and give me quite a few examples that are bad, but I can also sit here and go from now to next week with all the good ones. I notice in the committee report there is very little said about the goodness of the program, and it is mostly certain deficiencies.

So the thing that disturbed me particularly, and I hope won't happen because we don't look on this as Democratic or Republican.

We look on it as a job the business community has been requested to do, and as far as the men who serve in these jobs, Democrats or Republicans, there are many of each, they are trying to dedicate themselves to the job.

If you want to take and hurt this program considerably, which we feel is good, you can do this by citing one or two bad cases. So that the business community says, "What is the use of it, we are going to catch hell anyway, and there is no sense going on with it?" We firmly and sincerely believe and I do because I have been in the program 10 months and I have been with the top businessmen in the United States, I have been with businessmen in all these 131 cities and in my opinion they have been very dedicated to this cause, and I am afraid that if you get into a partisan byplay that they will throw up their hands and say, what is the use of going through this kind of a program?

And it will hurt them. That is why I object to the subcommittee report, and all these newspapers articles that have gone out pointing to a few horrible examples.

Of course I dislike those horrible examples. I think those things should be exposed, and I think it should be monitored.

Senator CRANSTON. That is what the purpose is, certainly not to cover up anything; there is nothing partisan about it.

Mr. WILSON. I don't know what you would call it, because I am naive in this, whether you call it leaks, but I read it in the newspapers, the horrible examples that go out about this program, with an indication that the whole program is bad by association and then we get calls from 100 cities, which we are getting now, saying, "Well, what is going on, what kind of a program is it?"

So that it hurts tremendously with something I think, aside from the personal element, or anything else, saying it is good or bad, or anything else.

The thing that I worry about is that you have got a good program here, and I don't like to see it hurt, and I sincerely mean that.

Senator CRANSTON. I am sure you don't want to suggest, Mr. Wilson, that we should ignore instances that have gone awry.

It seems to me we should correct that, and have 100 percent compliance with the law.

Mr. WILSON. I agree. With 25,000 companies participating over the whole country, there are going to be a lot more.

I can't help but think there are going to be some of these, and I don't like to get the impression that all are bad, because of the examples that come out.

Senator CRANSTON. I made clear in my opening remarks that I agree with what NAB is trying to do. I think it is important that we have a JOBS program that leads to retention of people in jobs, with careful use of the taxpayer's money.

What responsibility do you think NAB should have itself for seeing that a contractor is able to successfully complete, and does so? Should NAB have any responsibility?

Mr. WILSON. I think in view of the fact that our only request has been by the Government that we bring the employer together with the Labor Department to set up the contact, that we are not in a position to monitor them.

If we can help to monitor them, we don't want a bad contact either. So we agree with you 100 percent that where they are bad they should be exposed and should be done, but that is not really our job.

Senator CRANSTON. Do you feel that the Department of Labor has adequate authority under the present law or present guidelines to do that?

Mr. WILSON. I really can't answer that, because I don't know what the law is in regard to that and the responsibility of the Labor Department.

I am only pointing out their responsibility is complex, and they should have the authority to do the job, if that is what you are asking me.

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