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MANPOWER DEVELOPMENT AND TRAINING

LEGISLATION, 1970

TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1970

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT, MANPOWER, AND POVERTY,
OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 9:15 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 4232, New Senate Office Building, Senator Gaylord Nelson (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Senators Nelson (presiding), Cranston, and Javits.

Staff members present: Robert O. Harris, staff director, and William R. Bechtel, professional staff member.

Senator NELSON. We will open the hearings this morning. The first witness will be Mr. Robert Wilson, executive vice president of the National Alliance for Businessmen.

We are pleased to have you here this morning. If any of you make comments would you identify yourselves for the record?

STATEMENT OF ROBERT J. WILSON, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF BUSINESSMEN, WASHINGTON, D.C.; ACCOMPANIED BY GERARD PETERSON, NAB EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR OPERATIONS; ROY SIEMILLER, NAB VICE PRESIDENT FOR LABOR LIAISION; CLARK HAMILTON, NAB CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS; AND JOSEPH CUNNINGHAM, COUNSEL

Mr. WILSON. On my left is Mr. Gerry Peterson of the National Alliance of Businessmen. He is loaned from the Aetna Life and Casualty Co. Mr. Cunningham, who was formerly with Du Pont, is an attorney and is serving as counsel for us here.

On my right is Mr. Clark Hamilton, who is on loan from IBM, and Mr. Roy Siemiller, our former international president of the International Association of Machinists, AFL-CIO, and he is presently a vice president for labor liaison.

Senator NELSON. Your statement will be printed in full in the record. You may present it however you desire. If you wish to elaborate on it at any time, feel free to do so, and if anybody else wishes to make comments, please do.

And go ahead, Mr. Wilson.

Mr. WILSON. Thank you, Senator.

Mr. Chairman, honorable members of the committee: My name is Robert J. Wilson. I am a businessman, presently chairman of the board of Universal Airlines, Inc. and now serve as executive vice president for administration and secretary-treasurer of the National

Alliance for Businessmen here in Washington. I have held this position with NAB for the past 10 months. With me today is Mr. Gerard Peterson, on loan from Aetna Life and Casualty, Inc. to serve as NAB executive vice president of operations.

Also present is Mr. Roy Siemiller, former president of the International Association of Machinists, AFL-CIO, and presently the NAB vice president for labor liaison, and I would like to say in connection with that that over the years I have been on the opposite side of the table from Mr. Siemiller in many events and it is rather comforting to have him on the same side of the table with me here.

Mr. Clark Hamilton, on loan from the IBM Corp., formerly served as NAB vice president for operations and currently is responsible for congressional relations.

And Mr. Joseph Cunningham, our counsel, formerly NAB vice president for government relations on loan from the Du Pont Co. We are going to make our statement very simple, telling what we have done and what we hope to accomplish.

The objectives of the National Alliance for Businessmen are straight forward. Pursuant to a mandate from President Johnson in 1968, renewed by President Nixon in 1969, we work to find employment for disadvantaged Americans in the private sector. The difference between this program and others is that the employer must hire the disadvantaged worker first before any training begins.

And this is one of the keys of this whole program, that is the hire first principle. On-the-job-training and other supportive services follow the new hire's immediate entry to the employer's work force. The new trainee is a regular employee of the company from day on with all the rights and other benefits which come as a result of this employment and this is true in both voluntary, which we call the non-contract program, and the contract program.

As soon as a short probationary period is completed, he in most cases receives the valuable right of seniority, like every other new employee, and all other benefits that come through employment.

I would like to make clear at the outset that we do not appear before this committee beating our breast, proclaiming our virtues, or claiming that our program can be the answer to all the problems of the disadvantaged.

Because there is legislation pending which may affect the NAB program, I am here on behalf of the business community to tell you that we sincerely believe in the program and feel that it is a good one.

First, we feel it is good from the social standpoint because it provides many thousands of the disadvantaged with a real job opportunity through which they can enter the mainstream of our society with dignity and respect.

I presume that some of you have had the privilege of going to the ghettos.

Some of us have also been able to see it. This is really some kind of a strange land, the people we talk about and to whom we reach out. One of the things that has come out of this program

that is most interesting is that they have a grapevine. They have a grapevine in the ghettos that carries through, just the same as you have a grapevine in a prison.

I don't how it works. But the grapevine in connection with these people, says that there is an opportunity, that there are jobs with the National Alliance of Businessmen, and the word is spreading, that NAB really means it when it says there are jobs.

Second, the program is good from an economic standpoint. It benefits business by bringing into the labor force individuals who might otherwise be lost to productive employment. At the same time it benefits the economy by helping individuals become taxpayers, avoid trouble with the law, and through holding a job, become productive citizens.

And third, the program is changing the attitudes and practices of American business toward hiring and training unskilled and disadvantaged workers. The replies the subcommittee has received in response to the questionnaires it has sent NAB employers provide abundant evidence that the NAB program has resulted in new and liberalized hiring practices in a wide range of American employers.

There has been this type of individual, who is on the lower scale in the disadvantaged, and he has had difficulty in getting past the front door and into the personnel departments.

This is changing, and evaluations have shown that businessmen have found that this type of individual can make a good workman and can fit into society.

In the first year NAB operated in 50 cities. In the second year NAB was requested to expand to 131 cities. In 1969, we established offices in 78 additional cities in the space of 9 months. All of these are staffed with loaned executives, and with offices contributed by the business community, for the most part.

We have now been requested to cover the entire United States, and we're in the process of setting up the offices in another 70 cities. Again, these offices are staffed in most cases and paid for by the business community.

In my opinion, from just a plain logistics standpoint, this has been a tremendous accomplishment, and it has been a difficult one, because these offices are functioning; they've moving toward the goal which we want to achieve. I think that they are doing a tremendous job.

Our latest figures as of March 31 show cumulative hires of 432.797. Of these 209,066 are still at work with their original employers.

An additional 19,285 completed at least 6 months of training before leaving their original employers. Six months is more than enough to establish a work record to qualify as an experienced worker and to change jobs successfully. We have, nonetheless excluded these workers as well as others who have moved directly to other jobs, school or the military in calculating our retention rate of 48 percent.

Senator NELSON. May I ask a question at this point?

You state cumulative hires of 432,000 as of March 1st. That is the total hires?

Mr. WILSON. We are talking about the numbers who have been hired and the number who have been retained and are still on the job. The figure of 432,000 were actually hired, and of those, 209,066 are still on the payroll with their original employer.

Senator NELSON. And this 400,000 plus figure is hires from the day the program started?

Mr. WILSON. That is correct.

Senator NELSON. What was that date?

Mr. WILSON. It was from the beginning, Senator, June of 1968. Senator NELSON. Of that 209,066, who are still at work with the original employers, what period of time, what is the range of the period of time they have been with the original employer? Mr. WILSON. Well, it could be any time from the beginning, June, 1968, to the present time, March 31st.

Senator NELSON. So in that figure of 209,000 you have some people who were hired in the last few days, the day before March 31st. Mr. WILSON. Correct.

Senator NELSON. Do you have any breakdown of the retention period for that 209,000 at all?

In other words, how many of them are there for 2 years, or, rather since June 1st, 1968, and how many for 1 year and how many for 6 months?

Mr. WILSON. No, we don't Senator.

Senator NELSON. Do you have a breakdown by the month of how many were hired?

You have 432,797. Do you know by the month how many were hired that gave you that cumulative figure?

Mr. WILSON. I would defer to Mr. Hamilton, who has been in charge of our management information system.

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator, in regard to the reporting that we have, it is a cumulative reporting system. In other words, everything that has been reported previously will be reported in the current month.

Therefore, we are not able to determine, in answer to your question, in any given month how many people have been retained for any period of time prior to that report.

Senator NELSON. Do you have a figure that shows how many, starting from the beginning, how many have been hired each month?

STATEMENT OF CLARK HAMILTON, OF NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF BUSINESS CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS

Mr. HAMILTON. Yes, we can show the net increment between this report and the preceding report.

Senator NELSON. In your reporting system, could you lay out the 23 months since you started, and give the figure of how many were hired, in each one of those 23 months?

Mr. HAMILTON. I would say we could do with a relatively high degree of accuracy since October, 1968. The reason the figures are not too good before that time is that there was no information system per se prior to that time.

At that point, there was a regular reporting system established, and so I would say from October or November of 1968 through the

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