different ways as we can to make this transition from school to work easier. At the Manpower Institute which Willard Wirtz heads up, for example, they have made a great deal of the fact that one of the only ways that you can successfully deal with this problem is get the entire community involved at the local level in a collaborative effort, education, labor, business, voc ed system, all of them, so that the kids that are flowing through the schools can move out into the work force into jobs that do exist, that they are well trained for these jobs, that they know early enough about what is required, about what they themselves will have to do to prepare, that we find ways to prepare them. Mr. FLOOD. I certainly asked you the right question. Mr. BURDETSKY. I really feel it is an essential thing to do. Mr. FLOOD. All right. Mr. FLOOD. Mr. Shriver. Mr. SHRIVER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. PROGRAM COORDINATION THROUGH CETA I recently received in my office a copy of a special report of the National Commission for Manpower Policy dated October of last and I am sure you are familiar with that. year, Mr. BURDETSKY. Yes, sir. Mr. SHRIVER. The report notes that the Federal Government now spends in excess of $6 billion annually on manpower programs. Your request here today represents about a third of that. Other manpower programs are carried out under vocational rehabilitation, vocational education, social services, Wagner-Peyser. It is a very lengthy report, and it does include a number of specific recommendations for the Department of Labor and Department of Health, Education, and Welfare regarding steps which you could take to improve the coordi nation and the effectiveness of these various programs.: This committee has responsibility in overseeing the HEW part of the budget. and it seems to me that we should perhaps discuss the recommendations and find out what plans have been made for implementation of those recommendations. First, the Commission recommends that the annual plans for the employment service, the work incentive program, vocational education, vocational rehabilitation, and social services be coordinated through the CETA system. What is your reaction to that and what steps, if any, are being taken to coordinate these programs? Mr. HEWITT. We support that and have been working with HEW for a considerable period of time to try to get some movement in that direction. We don't have the same kind of statutes to work with in Vocational education and SRS, for example. Those are State grants, go to State administrations, do not pass through to the local prime sponsors, so there are some considerable problems in coordinating those State-planned programs under CETA. We do have a formal memorandum of agreement between the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare that envisions strengthening the relationships between the programs that they are responsible for administering, State grant programs, in this area with CETA. We work with them on a continuing basis. We bring them into consultations with prime sponsors on matters of education, health planning, and in an attempt to help the prime sponsors to relate their programs more directly to the programs that are administered by the State agencies under HEW. Having said that, we would be the first to agree that there is still a lot of room for progress in getting full coordination among all these programs. Mr. SHRIVER. Do you need any legislation? Mr. HEWITT. Well, I am inclined to think that we do, without coming up here as an administration spokesman and saying we are proposing legislation. There are a lot of difficulties on the HEW side of the programs of providing the Secretary's Office with some directive force over the Office of Education, SRS, and that sort of thing so that they can require some things to be done that would improve our capability to link programs together at the community level. Mr. SHRIVER. Since the Government is involved so heavily, some $6 billion worth, it seems to me that there should be something coming from the administration if it is needed. Can you on an administrative basis standardize the planning cycles, reporting requirements, and information systems of these various manpower programs? Mr. HEWITT. Well, these are areas that we are working in. Each one of these much broader programs has a lot of its own perceived imperatives in terms of reporting. The Federal Government is involved in a much broader activity to try to standardize all grant administration. PRIVATE SECTOR INVOLVEMENT Mr. SHRIVER. The Commission also recommends that prime sponsors under CETA be encouraged to develop closer ties to the private sector and that the Department of Labor develop and publish a technical assistance guide to help the sponsors in this effort. Mr. HEWITT. Well, we have a number of technical assistance guides and we will continue to produce more and hope to improve the ones we have, but getting private sector involvement in manpower programs has been a high priority objective of the Department of Labor since 1962 with the enactment of MDTA, and while some progress has been made I don't think one would contend that we have been all that successful for whatever the reasons. We tried OJT early in MDTA and a lot of employers said there is too much red tape in that. We tried the JOBS programs and we helped 185,000 enrollees a year under the JOBS programs. That was nowhere near the aspirations of the former administration that launched the budget for that program that year. We met under the auspices of the National Commission for Manpower Policy with 25 executive vice presidents of large corporations just last October for that very purpose of trying to find out how we could move manpower programs closer to an image that they would be more comfortable using to get a greater participation by them and came away not entirely satisfied that we had rediscovered a way to move it, so I think that is an area of substantial unfinished business. We are hopeful that it will be proved more manageable at the community level where perhaps business can see its direct advantage in helping local government move people from a state of dependency into a state of employment and self-support on earnings and will become larger participants in this process. But there is still a lot of work ahead of us. FOUR PERCENT DISCRETIONARY MONEY Mr. SHRIVER. Are any of the Governors using their 4-percent discretionary grants for coordination purposes? Mr. HEWITT. I don't think that a lot of that 4-percent grant is going into what you would call coordination of this kind. Mr. SHRIVER. Shouldn't they be encouraged to use that? Mr. HEWITT. I am not sure that it is money that is the problem or the lack of it. They do have a small fund to support their State manpower services councils which have to include statutorily these various groups that at least pass on the Governor's prime sponsor budget and to try to encourage coordination. That is the explicit function of the State manpower services councils, but they have a lot of learning to do before they can do that to a high degree of efficiency and we have some learning to do before we can go out there and teach them how to do that. EMPLOYMENT SERVICE ASSISTANCE TO PRIME SPONSORS Mr. SHRIVER. The Commission tended to favor an expansion of the role of the employment service in the comprehensive manpower system by giving the local employment service office more discretion in furnishing assistance to the prime sponsor. Would you comment on that? Mr. HEWITT. Yes, sir. What we are trying to do with the employment service system, which as you know we administer and that budget will be before you tomorrow morning, is to get the State employment service agencies to decentralize decisionmaking within the State agency more to the local office managers so that the local officer in city A can be responsive to the CETA prime sponsor in that city without having to work through the State capital. We favor that and we are working with the State agencies to encourage more of that. AUTOMATED JOB MATCHING Mr. SHRIVER. Whatever happened to the automated job matching project? Is it still being developed? Mr. HEWITT. Yes, sir. Mr. BURDETSKY. It is being developed and it is part of our next budget discussion. We feel that that is one of the really important innovations that we have gotten a start on that we want to expand that we think will make a most important contribution to the employment service performance over the years ahead. OPERATION SER Mr. SHRIVER. The chairman asked specifically about some of the other programs that are in this budget. Let me ask about SER. How much is in this request for the activity of SER? Mr. HEWITT. The bulk of the funding that goes to SER, of course, comes from prime sponsors. Mr. SHRIVER. I know that. Mr. HEWITT. We can't tell you how much they are going to put in 1977 but we can tell you how much they put into it in 1976. Mr. BURDETSKY. About $20 million now. Mr. SHRIVER. Together with what they get from other sources how will their operating level of 1977 compare with 1976? That is what I really want to know. Mr. BURDETSKY. It will be at least as much as now and possibly more. Mr. HEWITT. That is an expectation. We don't have any way of either requiring use or nonuse by SER or OIC, or the Urban League, or any other community-based organization, or for that matter the Employment Service. Mr. SHRIVER. But do you have a figure in the budget? Mr. WALKER. We have a figure for 1975 and 1976. The prime sponsors are just now getting started in their planning cycles for fiscal 1977 and how that comes out I guess we don't really know at this point. However, based on experience, local funding for SER went from approximately $20 million in fiscal 1975 to about $20.5 million in 1976. We have been providing approximately $12 million out of the national account. Mr. BURDETSKY. Overall technical assistance which they provide to the local SER chapters. Mr. SHRIVER. Thank you. MANPOWER SURVEY Mr. MICHEL. You have apparently had a study underway for several years now on what happens to comprehensive employment and training enrollees after they complete their training. Can you give us a synopsis of what you have found thus far? Mr. BURDETSKY. We have launched the Continuous Longitudinal Manpower Survey which is tracking a national sample of participants in the comprehensive employment and training decentralized programs to determine both their preprogram and postprogram employment and earnings experience. It started with enrollees in JanuaryMarch 1975, and has provided data on their characteristics and earnings in the year before enrollment, but sufficient time has not yet elapsed to enable data on their services received and how they have fared after receiving these services. The initial followup data will start to become available late this year. POST-TRAINING EMPLOYMENT Mr. MICHEL. Pursuing this question back further in time, since the late 1950's a number of major manpower programs have been enacted by Congress. Do you have any figures as to the total number of enrollees versus those who completed the programs? Mr. BURDETSKY. Unfortunately, we only have figures on completions for two programs, manpower development and training institutional and on-the-job training through 1974. I will be glad to provide this information for the record. [The information follows:] |