jobs; and so you are hiring into the lowest category of, let's say, city or county or State employment. The management, you know, middle management for the higher-paying jobs, it's up to $5 or $6 an hour, is extremely difficult to obtain.

In Seattle, we have no jobs for the thousands of engineers that are available, but we have no dearth of emotional counseling. These are what I call bootstrap organizations. Most are called self-help. They are numerous; and for some people these are helpful to them and necessary. The largest self-help group is SEA-VEST, Self-Help Employment and Association of Volunteer Engineers, Scientists and Technicians. It lists about 600 members. The oldest group, formed over 3 years ago, has about 50 members. Possibly the reason why its enrollment is low is because it requires a $10 initiation fee.

Many of the church organizations in our area have self-help groups. Even my church, the Unitarian, though small in number, has a selfhelp operation. I'm very skeptical about the ability of self-help to really get at the problem which is meaningful work for engineers and unemployed people. Your bills are, I think, a practical approach and

necessary.

I don't know of any other work being done. I'd like to answer any questions you have.

Senator KENNEDY. I think you have told the story very well. I think from you and the others this morning-from your examples, repeated by thousands of others across the length and breadth of the country, we have heard the most convincing type of commentary for the importance of this legislation. Perhaps the legislation that we have introduced is not the perfect answer; but I think it's the best means to meet this crisis. Hopefully, we'll be able to enact legislation and have operational programs before all your savings are depleted and before all of the resources which you have been able to put aside are used up.

So, your testimony gives us an additional sense of urgency about the importance of this legislation. And it substantiates my very deepseated belief that the people who are affected by this situation are some of the most distinguished, capable, technical people that this country has ever produced.

The testimony this morning certainly substantiates that. So, I want to thank you very much for coming and sharing your experiences with us. I know it's not a very happy occasion for you; but it's extremely important in terms of our record, and I want to thank you very much. We'll now move to our next witness, Prof. Paul Thompson of the Harvard Business School. He has been directing a study on engineering employment and will discuss his results with us. Professor Thompson, you have a rather extensive statement here. We can put it all in the record and proceed in any way in which you would like to.

STATEMENT OF PAUL H. THOMPSON, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL

Mr. THOMPSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I welcome the opportunity to be here this day. I, with you, have listened to these statements given by unemployed engineers and have been moved by them. The thing that I can add today is that my colleagues and I have been listening to statements like these, to many statements like these by

unemployed engineers, mostly in the Massachusetts area. The statements you have heard today are typical of the many we've heard. We have a tape recording which brings excerpts from these interviews and I think they will add to these proceedings.

We have been conducting these interviews as part of a study on "The Effects of Unemployment on Engineering Careers" which is being funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Manpower Administration. Since this study bears directly on these proceedings let me describe it to you briefly.

In 1967 Prof. Gene Dalton and I began a study of engineering careers in seven different organizations. These organizations included four that were primarily in the aerospace industry and three that were in technology-based commercial industries. A total of 2,500 engineers and engineering managers were included in the study. They worked in a number of different engineering disciplines including: Electrical, mechanical, chemical, optical, and aeronautical engineering. We collected data on such factors as age, years of experience, education level, salary, performance rating, etc. Unfortunately, in the past 2 years layoffs and unemployment have become a too frequent part of engineering careers, two factors which we felt should not be ignored. In August of this year the Labor Department agreed to support Malcolm Matson, Fred Foulkes, and myself in our efforts to study this problem. It was our decision to return to the seven organizations to find out how many of the 2,500 engineers had been laid off. We then planned to do an indepth study of the experiences of those who were laid off.

The study is only partially completed at the present time but I can give you some preliminary findings which should be of interest to this committee. To date we have only had a chance to study the statistics from three of the seven organizations, but as it turns out, the largest number of engineers laid off in the total sample were laid off by these three organizations, all of which were part of the aerospace industry. In 1969 the three organizations employed a total of 1,496 engineers, and by July 1971, 387, or 26 percent of those engineers had been laid off.

It is interesting to compare the group that was laid off with those still employed: For instance, the average age of the two groups is almost exactly the same, that is, 40 years old (see table I).

TABLE 1.-COMPARISON OF LAID OFF ENGINEERS WITH THOSE STILL EMPLOYED

Those who were laid off worked for the company 812 years prior to layoff; while those still employed averaged 10.9 years for the company by 1971. The average performance rating of the two groups is very interesting. Some people have argued that the recent layoffs of

engineers is a good thing, claiming that the companies are laving off their lowest performers. These people maintain that those being laid off are the least effective, marginal engineers (probably the bottom 10 percent), who should get out of engineering and into other fields anyway. I've heard that argument from all kinds of people, from students to corporation presidents. As might be expected those who are still emploved have the higher average performance rating, i.e., 54.8. This rating is a percentile rating based on managements' evaluation of the individual engineer's performance and it ranges from 1 to 100. One is the lowest rating and 100 is the highest. The laid off engineers had an average rating of 34.8. Such a rating would indicate that certainly not all or even a maior part of these engineers could be considered marginal. Looking to individuals. 20 percent of those laid off did have ratings in the bottom 10 percentile, and perhaps many of these engineers should look to other fields for employment. The other 80 percent. were definitely not in the bottom 10 percent, in fact, 26 percent of those laid off had ratings about the 50 percentile. These are certainly not just marginal engineers. They are men and women who have made important contributions to our Nation's technical achievement in the past decades and they have the skills to continue to make important contributions if given that opportunity.

Another important factor is that these engineers have been highly paid. The average salary in 1969 for the employed group was $15,700 and for the laid off group, $15,000. Their pattern of living is bound to be on a scale which they cannot hope to support by means of unemployment compensation or welfare payments. A recent National Science Foundation study reported that as of June 1971, those engineers who were then unemployed had been unemployed for an average of 8 months. In view of this, it is very likely that the personal resources of many of these unemployed engineers have by now been completely exhausted.

Finally, with respect to the education of those that were laid off, 11 percent had less than a bachelor's degree, 68 percent had bachelors degrees, 20 percent had masters degrees, and 1 percent had earned Ph. D.'s. These are for the most part highly educated people who have been very surprised to find themselves unemployed and unable to find work.

However, statistics only present one side of the story. As part of this study we have interviewed a number of engineers and we were disturbed enough by what we heard to want to bring samples of some of those interviews to this hearing. While we have hours of engineers' interviews on tape, we have only a few minutes in which to summarize what they are saying. There seem to be several basic themes coming through in the interviews.

For one thing, the engineers that have been laid off, whether they are now employed or not, are a bitter and rather angry group. Perhaps you can get a better feeling of this by listening to some of them rather than to me:

"I guess I am kinda hostile. At that time in the fifties there was a big cry for engineers. The Government felt they needed these kind of people. I figured I'd given a long time to the country. That's why I'm kinda hostile. By and large, I think that Government and industry are totally responsible and I think that they have been very careless

in the way things were handled. I think it was a political expedient that put the engineering profession where it is, and I'm bitter about this. Ya just don't throw, over a period of 2 years, 200,000 people out of work, or somewhere in that area."

"Can I write to Congress now and say, 'Why don't you pass the bills to support me and get me a long-term loan so I can get back on my feet. I mean it's kind of stupid to do it. My name's not Lockheed. But anyway, I'm kind of bitter about the way the thing's handled."

"I guess you have to be. There's no way you can't be. I'm not unusually bitter, but, in the back of my mind-well, it's just that I've put all this training in. My country said they needed me--and now they've just thrown us to the wayside. They continue wasting money on so many other things, like payin' people not to grow crops and that type of crap and you can pay people not to make SSTs. Why are they any worse? I think it's a shame for the country. They got all these people, and all this talent, and if they hadn't been told to become engineers, or prodded into it, they might've become doctors, lawyers-a lot of 'em would-doctors, lawyers, dentists-cause they were that kind of people, that type of talent. And the country can use more doctors and dentists and such. This tremendous resource is going to waste. And then they say, 'what's the matter?"

You really get a stronger sense of the bitterness and anger they feel when you are able to talk with them face to face, but nevertheless their feelings come across pretty clearly over the tape recorder.

One reason for their bitterness is that they feel they have been betrayed. It is the opinion of many that the Federal Government lured them into engineering because the country needed them. After Sputnik was launched there was a big campaign to get loyal Americans to go into engineering so we could catch up to the engineering accomplishments of Russia. These people answered that call in large numbers but now feel that the Government is saying "we don't need you anymore so we'll just discard you." You get this feeling from the following engineers:

"I think that there's definitely a conspiracy-or there was a conspiracy-no, not a conspiracy, but well, a plan to channel manpower. You could see engineers coming to the schools when I was in high school."

"They had this big push-they said you're not an American when Sputnik was launched. We were way behind. It became almost a commitment. Then they told everybody they should become an engineer. I graduated from high school in 1957, and the Government told all these people it's honoring your Government for you to go into engineering. And so people did it for their Government, and now they've given it back to them. Right up the old kazoo."

"I knew I didn't want to teach. The more I was exposed to computers, and practical problems like engineering problems, the more I became interested in them. I don't know why, I just happened into it. I don't think it was an accident. I knew what I didn't want to do. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do."

"I'll put it to you this way. If I had my choice to go through school again, I would never be an engineer. I have no idea why I became an engineer. I really don't know, it was like inertia. I started moving down the track, and I became one. I was very good in those courses—

math, sciences, but then I was also very good in social sciences too." Just as they blame the Federal Government for leading them into engineering in the first place, they now say that the Federal Government is the cause of the high unemployment rate among engineers. They argue that the Government had been financing a large part of the research and development being conducted in this country and when research and development funds were cut back in NASA, the Department of Defense, et cetera, then the companies that were losing contracts had no choice but to lay off large numbers of engineers. Most of them do not blame the company that laid them off-they blame the Federal Government. Furthermore, they look almost exclusively to the Federal Government for the solution to their problems of unemployment.

"I don't really think the industry is really that concerned. I don't think they really care about what's happened to all these cats that got dumped on 128, the San Francisco freeway, et cetera. I've heard comments from people I've known all my life: 'You guys made it before and now you gotta go out and scratch for it.' That's a heck of a testimony to the technical community that's kept the Nation up in the forefront for so many years. And that's how I feel about the Government's handling it in such a poor way. Now that the polishing cloth is all used up, you just throw it out. To me it's irreparable damage. You just can't put the community in high and low gear. If I can use a technical analogy, it's like a turbine engine. You go fast, but it takes a little time to wind up."

"No, I think it's part of the cycle. We go to extremes. There's no damping applied. In an oscillatory system, it keeps oscillating unless you provide some way of dissipating. You do this by anticipatingthat's synonymous with planning-trying to anticipate and thereby apply correction. It's like one big feedback control system. You try to apply a correction so that you don't get an ill result."

"The problem is everybody talks about changing priorities, which is fine. It depends on what you feel is important now. But if you cut off one tap, you gotta open some other tap in order to keep these people going. Let 'em build somethin'. For example, the SST-all the baloney about it. It's like a WPA project. You let 30,000 guys have some work to build two planes. Then this nonsense with the ecology. What that could've done to the ecology-two planes. That whole battle was ridiculous. They just passed the Lockheed aid bill-a bill that never should've been passed. They say free enterprise. Where is this free enterprise? There was no reason for it, and yet it passed because of the job situation the SST was in. Actually there had to be a better reason than that for the Lockheed aid bill to be passed. Now, I think, the whole thing is obviously tied up in the Vietnam war. This whole cutback. It's my personal opinion that the Vietnam war has divided the country, and has gotten people killed. It will be screwing this country for a long time to come. All this research and development has gone to zero. They wasted all this money makin' bombs and airplanes that would destroy. Instead of using the 40 billion dollars for research and development, they spent it in Vietnam just throwin' it away, killin' people."

It is evident from this typical sampling that the engineers have a very negative attitude toward the Federal Government and the way