The employment service network was an ineffective bureaucracy with no experience in serving the disadvantaged when the first manpower programs of the '60's were passed.1/ Most ES offices were located in the central business district, distant from inner-city neighborhoods. Staff experience was limited to handling unemployment insurance recipients, individuals with job skills who were temporarily out of work. None of.

these characteristics boded well for successful handling of the new training programs. ES performance in the '60's exposed the service's incapacity to deal with the poor, raising serious questions about the DOL decision to place them at the center of the manpower effort.2/

Repeated and sometimes conflicting DOL efforts have not succeeded in reshaping the Service. Some directives have been ignored, others adhered to only temporarily. There have been several small, effective experiments, but no effort to expand them to achieve much needed systemic changes in the way the ES handles the disadvantaged. The overall impression is that Labor Department planners have developed impressive concepts for modernization, but they have failed to commit the substantial resources needed to achieve institutional change. They have been unwilling to accept the political battles that would inevitably result from an imposition of meaningful federal controls over the state agencies. The result: much superficial activity

but little lasting reform.

1. Human Resources Development (HRD). The first major DOL attempt to reorient the ES system toward the disadvantaged came in 1966. The Department designed the Human Resources Development model (HRD) to guide local office operations. The model built upon the experiences of the Youth Opportunity Centers, established in the early '60's to focus on employment problems of disadvantaged young people. HRD was originally presented as a general series of goals for the programs created by the 1966 amendments to the MDTA. It suggested that the ES should provide disadvantaged applicants a full range of supportive services, in a flexible, comprehensive manner. In August 1966, a directive (USESPL 2092) went out to the ES offices instructing them to develop plans of action for implementing HRD. There was no suggestion that the ES should curtail its services to the job-ready or the employers.

The directive was unclear. Many offices never understood whether HRD was a new program, to be separately administered by the ES, like its programs for veterans or the handicapped, whether it applied to all or only a few of the manpower programs or whether it represented a basic reorganization of the services, as the DOL later claimed it did.

In 1967, DOL made 3,264 additional staff positions available to ES state agencies to carry out HRD. The funds for the positions were diverted out of the MDTA appropriations. By 1968, very few offices had done much to alter their operations despite the new directive and the new staff positions. A DOL consultant, the Auerbach Corporation,3/ evaluated the program in 30 cities and concluded:

"The HRD concept is not effectively realized
in the operation of the HRD program. The HRD
program is too feeble; deprived of funds and
effective staff and services; it has been un-
able to do more than effect a minor and trans-
ient change in the extended problems of chronic
unemployment. (p. i).

It also reached the devastating conclusion that:

"the chronically disadvantaged are not reached
by the program; when they are, they are seldom
helped. . . . In the more significant areas of
employment enhancement [improving a person's
job eligibility] virtually no results were
noted." (p ii).

Pointing to problems that would plague future DOL efforts to redirect the ES network, the consultant stated that "the services available through HRD are little more than those provided through most ES operations. . . Further, "the existing job order files are not suitable for many disadvantaged unless the standard complement of high turnover and dead-end positions is used."4/

The Report pointed to the difficulty of successfully reorienting ES offices to serve the disadvantaged. Many office managers felt their prime duty was to make employers happy. It also concluded that the services tended to discriminate against minorities. "An analysis of all applicant records," according to the Report, "showed that the black applicants, on the average, received poorer service and worse job codes than whites." It added, "though conscious discrimination is not widespread in ES offices, the present system tends to perpetuate applicants in unsatisfying or menial work because that was all they could get in the past." (p. ix)

2. Employability Development Teams. Recognizing that HRD had done little to reorient the ES, the Department began work on a new organizational model. While hearings were being held on the Work Incentive Program, Manpower Administration specialists designed the "employability development model." This model, planned for the WIN program, built upon HRD but was more specific.

a

It provided for special "teams" to develop the "employability plan" required by the WIN legislation for each applicant. Each team was to have a limited caseload (approximately 200 applicants) and was to consist of three to five members: counselor, a manpower specialist, a work and training specialist, a coach and a clerk. The team was responsible for "job development and placement, assessment and counseling, skill training and on-the-job training, tutoring and other pre-professional support services, and clerical activities." The idea was that the team would include all the functions necessary to prepare an individual for work he would no longer have to be shuf

fled among the ES office's multiple divisions.

In early 1968, the Department issued a directive requesting all field offices to set up teams to implement the WIN program. All the additional WIN staff slots were made available for the teams.

A Manpower Administration consultant, assessing the team approach 18 months later5/, concluded that the application of multiple, highly specialized staff resources to each client, was a good one. Unlike the HRD program he found that the employability development model had at least been implemented in the majority of the local offices surveyed--fifteen of twenty-three. However, the evaluator concluded that "the guidelines are often ignored at the local level, with the loss of many of their better and more imaginative concepts." Again, as with HRD and despite eight years of dealing with the disadvantaged, ES staff insensitivity persisted.

"The ability to understand and work with welfare
recipients, and minority group members is seldom

a part of the job description for ES staffs." (p. 10)

Even though some teams were found to be effective in relating to their disadvantaged clients, many were insensitive to the special needs of the poor. The biggest shortcoming of the new program, however, was its failure to develop jobs for the participants and to achieve permanent placements---its primary purpose.

In terms of staff involvement, the team model has caused only a small ripple in ES waters. The number of ES staff people working according to the model represents less than 15% of staff resources. Those local offices that have accepted the team approach use it only for WIN and--in modified form--for some CEP programs.6/

3. COMO.

In 1970, the Manpower Administration launched a third model for redesigning the operation of local ES offices. The "Conceptual Model" (COMO), has been initiated at least partially in seven ES offices, with plans for immediate expansion to four more,7/ adding 50 in FY 1972. COMO divides ES staff positions into three functional units according to the divergent needs of the ES clientele: open listings of job opportunities available for the skilled; employability exploration for the hard-to-place (this involves assistance to clients who have skills but who also have special problems, such as veterans or the handicapped) and employability development for the disadvantaged (to be administered by the teams discussed above).

No new staff positions have been provided to the COMO cities. Each, however, has been given job bank facilities, technical assistance from the DOL and its regional offices, and authorization to realign existing staff. According to DOL officials, initial evaluations show that COMO has had mixed results, in part, because of hasty start-up and lack of support from some state and regional offices and in part because of insufficient funding. Services to the job-ready (based on computers) have been good. Services to those who need some assistance and to those lacking in job qualifications have remained unchanged.

An Interim Report prepared for DOL by Abt Associates, Inc., concludes that in terms of placements of the disadvantaged, the COMO cities are not performing any better - if as well --

as non-COMO cities. The Report shows that although the number of disadvantaged applicants has increased in COMO cities, they are receiving fewer supportive services than before COMO; placements of the disadvantaged are below average in all the project cities.

In any event, DOL officials do not anticipate rapid expansion of the model. The division of ES operations, according to client needs and staff talents holds promise of making it a much more effective agency. But as in the case of the previous experiments, the Department is not committed to using COMO as a vehicle for effecting basic massive changes in the ES operations. It will probably be superceded by yet another reform model.

4. Job Banks. Another move taken by DOL to improve ES service has been the introduction of computerized job listings. Until 1969, all of the various offices of a big city employment service maintained their own job listings. Employers seeking workers from a broad area had to list with several offices. Similarly, job seekers had to register with a number of offices going through interviewing, counseling and classification in each office, (in the case of the disadvantaged, this was often impossible because of transportation costs). Employers seeking to avoid minority hiring would not list in inner-city offices. Employers often became aggravated by repeated calls from applicants for jobs already filled through another office. Finally, much time was spent by ES staff manually compiling job listings for each office.

In 1968, the ES discovered the computer. The first "job bank" was developed in Baltimore. Under the Baltimore system, job orders from employers are collected centrally and fed into a computer, which turns out a daily print-out of jobs. Copies of the print-out are delivered each morning to the various ES offices in the city and to the offices of various community organizations which conduct job placement programs. Each office uses the print-out as a basis for referral of clients to jobs. Before making a referral, a call is made to job bank headquarters to make sure that the job is still open.

Because information on all job openings in the area is quickly available to the disadvantaged, service to that group has shown marked improvement in Baltimore. Total placements have remained about the same as before (only 70 per day), but placements of the disadvantaged have increased from less than 20 percent to more than 50 percent of total placements in the area covered by the job bank. By October, 1969, the success of the Baltimore system had led to the establishment of job banks in five additional cities, with 56 more planned by the end of 1970.

In addition to computerization of job openings, the Manpower Administration experimented in fiscal 1969 and 1970 with "job-matching systems," computers which list information on applicants as well as job openings. With both sets of information, the computer can match applicants with suitable jobs.

Eventually, the listing system will go beyond "simple information on job openings to the most complex employment problems of individual workers and employers in a constantly changing labor market."8/In the words of the Assistant Secretary for Manpower, "It will mean to the ES system what penicillin has meant to medicine."

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