to replace the traditional data on measured unemployment with other indicators. Most particularly, we should recognize that the measured unemployment figure is a dangerous and unreliable guide for our macropolicies. Macropolicies affect the measured rate of unemployment less sensitively and tend to affect the price-level more rapidly than in the past.

Another aspect of the discussion is somewhat remarkable. Nobody seems to mention here the role and effect of minimum wage legislation. Overwhelming evidence has been accumulated over the past years by many researchers bearing on this issue. We know as surely as we can know anything that higher minimum wages raise unemployment. Of course, minimum wages do not affect the employment opportunities of Ph. D.'s, lawyers, clergymen, skilled or union workers. They do seriously affect, however, the least skilled and the young workers. In particular they affect teenagers and the ghetto workers. Removal of minimum wage laws would lower unemployment among teenagers by a large fraction and would probably lower the overall measured unemployment rate up to 1 percentage point. But we can rest assured that the AFL-CIO will push for higher minimum wages and thus create more unemployment.

Mr. ROUSSELOT. Thank you.

Mr. FRANCIS. I would really have quite a bit to say on this subject. May I submit it?

Mr. ROUSSELOT. Please do.

And if each of you have anything additional to say on this, I would appreciate it.

Mr. ROUSSELOT. Mr. Chairman. I would appreciate submitting for the record, the two articles that were in the Wall Street Journal to which I referred.

Mr. GONZALEZ. Without objection, it will be done. [The newspaper articles referred to follow:]

[From the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 31, 1977]

BO GRIER, ARISTOCRAT OF THE STREETS

ATLANTA.-Raymond "Bo" Grier, 24, spends most of his afternoons and evenings shooting baskets at the Peoplestown gym in a declined inner-city neighborhood here. These are the good times, with his buddies, working off the tensions that build during the long, idle days.

The bad times are the mornings, smoking the endless chain of cigarets and watching, empty-eyed, indistinguishable television game shows at the apartment where he lives with his sister. Since it is winter, the weather is usually too bad to get out and attack the powerless power steering on his faded gold 1968 Buick Wildcat parked outside. The Buick functioning would mean a vast uplift in status-wheels instead of riding the bus.

It has been two years since Bo had any kind of steady work, and by now his ways of existing on the streets without a job may be so deeply ingrained that he may never change. Whether he does or doesn't is important to the social and economic well-being of this country, because Bo Grier is a long way from alone out there. The unemployment rate for young blacks like Bo runs stubbornly at a rate twice that of whites. And the young blacks on the streets are important contributors to crime and related problems of the ghettos.

Bo has been out of a job so long he is not even counted among the unemployed any more. Instead, he and at last count 817.000 other Americans, 27 percent of them black like him, were dumped into a separate category consisting of the jobless who said they would look for a job if they thought anybody would give them one. They are, of course, the hardest core of the hard core jobless and most

share with Bo Grier a poor education, no skills and a deepening conviction that the American dream wasn't meant for them. Around government labor offices they are referred to as "the discouraged."

ASTUTE BETTOR

Categorizing Bo Grier is simple, but analyzing why he doesn't work is not. One thing that has to be considered is a slight physical handicap resulting from a land-mine injury in Vietnam. It doesn't interfere with his ability to swivel and drive down the court past his opponents at the gym. But it is a definite factor in his not having a job, because the government considers him 30 percent disabled and sends him a $149 check every month, making his quest for a job that much less pressing.

Living with his sister is another factor. She has a job on a production line making plastic drinking cups and pays the $140 rent and $30 or so monthly utility bill.

He also does a little gambling on the side, things like making side bets at crap games and the pool hall. He considers himself an astute bettor : "I don't bet on myself, I find somebody who's hot and bet on him. That way I can make my money and leave any time I'm ready."

Like many others without jobs, and particularly those with dim prospects of getting one, Mr. Grier also supplements his income with occasional ventures to the far side of the law. It is a career at which, like all others, he is unskilled, and he loses more than he wins. He is currently on probation for a conviction on three counts of check forging and has since been arrested and charged with receiving stolen property. He says that is all a mix-up, that he is innocent.

His probation officer is supposed to be interested in helping him get a job, but he's been of little help, probably because he and Bo have never met. "If you see him, tell him to get in to see me," the probation officer, Oliver Puckett says. Bo has been supposed to report monthly for the past six months but hasn't bothered, and nobody has bothered to find out why.

Bo's money goes out like it comes in, with little though being given to it, to support the Buick, tickets for an occasional rock concert, clothes, food, drink, whatever.

The thing is that Bo, and many others in his situation, have enough going for them that economic survival is not the question, only the style in which one survives. And the truth is that Bo, by freeloading on his sister, stretching his government check and hustling on the side, has made such an admirable adjustment to not having a job that it is not hard to see why be is not out pounding the pavements.

He says he used to spend most of his time looking for jobs, reading the classifieds, making the rounds, filling out applications and then never hearing anything. He feels he has every right to be discouraged, and his conviction that he can't get work has turned him into an aristocrat of the streets, who now wouldn't take some jobs if they were offered to him.

He's not interested in anything paying the $2.30 minimum wage, and even $2.50 he considers borderline. "Even that's not worth it," he says. "But it's something." There are also some lines of endeavor he's just not interested in: "I'll never wash dishes," he says disgustedly. "I tried that once for Howard Johnson's. I never got tireder of anything than seeing those dishes. I quit the second night."

He also has no interest in using his GI bill to go to school to acquire a marketable skill, because it doesn't seem feasible to him. "They only give you $258 a month, and after tuition and books and clothes and getting there and back, it's just not worth it."

One expert feels that talking to Bo about his problems with work is no way to a solution, because he may not be leveling: "He's b.s.'ing you, telling you what he believes a white man wants to hear," says George Harris, a teacher at Atlanta University's School of Social Work and a veteran of street culture himself.

To "street people" a job is money and nothing more. Mr. Harris says. And if the money isn't good enough, there is no point in working. "For Bo, there's nothing about personal satisfaction in doing a job," Mr. Harris says.

Another expert, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, feels that having a minimum wage might be a deterrent to men like Bo even looking for a job: "When you're being paid the minimum wage, you know you're the worst there is," he

says. "If we didn't have a minimum wage, then an unskilled worker could take a job while thinking there's someone somewhere being paid less, who's worth less than he is."

But others take a more pragmatic approach and conclude that any problems that Bo has are of his own making. "It's a matter of initiative," says a Georgia Employment Service official. For proof, he cites the Vietnamese refugees who have settled there. "They couldn't speak English so they couldn't get jobs here like they had in Vietnam. But that didn't stop them from begging us to get them any kind of work, just so they could make some money while they went to school to learn English. Some of them got menial jobs; they're trying to better themselves. That's initiative."

He agrees it can take time for an unskilled worker to find a job but insists that anyone who hasn't landed one in three or four months isn't trying very hard. "If he's sitting out more than a year, then he's really not looking for work."

JOBS AVAILABLE

Don Winnie, owner of a temporary help agency called Action Labor Services Inc., buys that. "It's not true that blacks can't get jobs in Atlanta," he says. "About 60% of the men we hire are black. We pay mostly minimum wage, but we supply transportation to the job site. The work's a little on the menial side, but if a guy's got anything at all on the ball, he'll be looking for something better. In fact, we lose a lot of our better workers to client companies."

But the view that Bo simply lacks initiative seems simplistic to Benjamin Hooks, who will be taking over as director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in March. There's much more to it, he says, including racism which is compounded by the media image whites have of unemployed young blacks. "It has to do with marketing, with selling one's self," says Mr. Hooks. Part of it is that a product of a black ghetto hasn't learned the societal niceties that are an asset to whites when they apply for a job.

Bo Grier insists that he has looked long and hard during most of the two years that he's only had a couple of short-term jobs. But for whatever reasons, it is inescapably true that he's barely looking, if at all, any more.

Even when the odds look good and his self-composed criteria are met, it is difficult to stir him into the action it would take to land the job. Recently, for example, he turned down an offer for a free ride to the downtown offices of Allright Parking of Georgia, Inc., to apply for work driving shuttle buses between Atlanta Airport and a soon-to-be-opened parking facility.

The job pays $3 an hour, and Will Wood, general manager of Allright, said Mr. Grier sounded qualified. A week later, after being further encouraged to ask for the job, Mr. Grier hadn't. "That tells me he doesn't want to work," Mr. Wood says. "He's got that benefit check and that's all he wants."

EMPLOYERS SUSPICIOUS

All of which leaves Bo Grier sitting in a haze of cigaret smoke in front of the TV until it is late enough to go down to the gym and shoot baskets. He's also caught in a sort of Catch 22 of the job market-the longer he's out of work, the more suspicious employers are of his earnestness in pursuing a job. One of the questions that has become standard in job interviews is why has he been out of work so long?

The longer he is out of work, the more he molds himself into the image whites have of young blacks they don't want to risk hiring.

It's rather ironic that Mr. Grier, who is a somewhat articulate young man, understands perfectly what he must do, but seems powerless to do it: "You've go to convince the people who're doing the hiring that you're willing to work. If you can do that chances are you'll get hired."

But the chances of Bo Grier doing that are slim, and getting slimmer. Finding employment for Bo and others like him is going to be the toughest challenge the Carter administration faces in its attempts to bring the U.S. unemployment rate down. But as long as they are left on the streets, the Bo Griers are going to continue to be a drag on their families and on society as large, regular contributors to the crime statistics and, perhaps most meaningful, dismal failures at climbing to the levels of decency and self-respect that most Americans take for granted.

[From the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 1, 1977]

MARK RINALDI: JOBLESS BY CHOICE

WEST HARTFORD, CONN.-Last March the Konover Investment Co. decided to lease its parking lot in downtown Hartford rather than continuing to operate it itself. In the resulting management change, Mark Rinaldi, who had been an attendant at the lot for two years, was laid off.

After two months without a job, Mr. Rinaldi applied for unemployment compensation. Ever since then he has received a $54 check from the state of Connecticut every two weeks. He could go on receiving it another 39 weeks.

For the spare, bearded 23-year-old who lives with his parents in this uppermiddle class suburb, the unemployment checks spell the difference between the need to keep working "at some crummy job" and his present leisurely lifestyle. Mr. Rinaldi is contemptuous of the system which allows him to collect unemployment and says he thinks he, and many of the others who receive checks, "are just ripping off the government."

If the unemployment compensation weren't available, Mr. Rinaldi concedes, he is confident he could get some sort of job. But, since it's here, "I'm not going to work my head off."

Mr. Rinaldi represents one aspect of the nation's unemployment statistics that doesn't appear in most discussions of "the unemployment problem." Young people under 24, like Mr. Rinaldi, account for about half the nation's unemployment, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, any federal programs to ease unemployment are expected to focus on employing youth. However, for some unemployed youth such as Mr. Rinaldi, obtaining a job simply isn't urgent. Between government checks and parental support, unemployment is an acceptable life-style. And it's doubtful that any federal program would touch someone like Mr. Rinaldi who is out of work by choice.

It's impossible to know how many of the people receiving unemployment compensation would be working if the money weren't availab'e. Critics have charged that unemployment compensation, rather than merely tiding people over while they are unavoidably between jobs, has become a way of life for some. Instead of being a charitable temporary aid for a worker thrown out on the street by the vicissitudes of the economy, payments by the state last so long they serve as a disincentive to find new work, critics argue.

Many government unemployment compensation officials and legislators counter that Mr. Rinaldi's situation is the exception rather than the norm. "I think basically 95% of the unemployed population really wants to work,” asserts Alfred Horowitz, director of research for the Connecticut State Department of Labor. He notes that during the 1960s unemployment was far lower than now. “It's due to our frustrations with being unable to get people back to work that we turn around and blame the people who are unemployed for being out of work," he contends.

David Pinsky, professor of labor, education and economics at the University of Connecticut and a long-time student of unemployment, agrees "there may be a few who abuse the system" who should be punished. But he says, "Just because you have embezzlers in banks, you don't close the banks."

Mr. Rinaldi apparently isn't abusing the system in any legal sense. But he is collecting unemployment compensation from the state despite expressing confidence that he could get some sort of job without any trouble.

Mr. Rinaldi doesn't fit most of the stereotypes of youth unemployment. He isn't desperately banging his head against walls trying to break into the job market. He isn't untrained and unskilled. He's al: eady held half a dozen jobs. He has training which could get him more jobs. A bright and articulate man with a quick wit, he can deal with customers and is responsible enough to work without supervision.

Yet he doesn't work and he doesn't particularly want to. Part of the problem is that none of the jobs in his past or foreseeable future offer much challenge or much money. Although he has been trained as a surveyor, he claims he couldn't get a job paying much more than $3.50 an hour-an amount, he says sardonically, which "isn't enough to induce me to go to work." If paid that amount which is equal to about $7,280 a year, before taxes, he says he could barely afford to rent an apartment, and by paying for food and a car he would end up with little more available money than he has now without working.

Contrary to much conventional wisdom about unemployment, Mr. Rinaldi demonstrates that being out of work doesn't automatically mean painful suffering. Certainly job losses are traumatic for most people, and unemployment pay, which is normally far below working wages, rarely relieves genuine hardship for some people who are laid off. But Mr. Rinaldi didn't mind being laid off, and he enjoys his current situation. In fact, a look at his situation prompts some reconsideration of just what "unemployment" really means in some instances.

Mr. Rinaldi hasn't been ambitious in the conventional sense in his working life. He took the job at the parking lot while he was training to be a surveyor at Hartford State Technical College. When he completed the course he decided he'd rather continue working 25 or 30 hours a week at the lot than take one of the three jobs he was offered as a map maker. Being a parking attendant "was relaxing," he recalls. "I didn't have to work up a sweat. I could do what I wanted."

That isn't to say the parking lot was without drawbacks. It did make some demands on his time. It wasn't terribly stimulating. And take home pay, averaging $41 a week, wasn't very lucrative. The biggest worry, however, was crime. Mr. Rinaldi was held up twice during his last few months at the lot, even though he was located a mere two blocks from police headquarters in Hartford. At that he considered himself lucky. An attendant in the lot across the street was knifed one night.

So when the management changed, Mr. Rinaldi, who had worked fairly steadily at a variety of part-time, unskilled jobs since he turned 16 years old, wasn t upset by the layoff. Living with his parents and drawing on some $1,000 he had in savings, he figured he could easily survive until he decided what he wanted to do next. Collecting unemployment pay was an afterthought suggested by friends who at various times had, as he puts it, "been on Ella s payrol." (Ella Grasso is Connecticut's governor.)

But when he began collecting the unemployment check, any sense of urgency about finding another job disappeared. Connecticut, like most other states, requires that people receiving unemployment compensation be "actively looking" for jobs. But in practice that's nearly unenforceable. Mr. Rinaldi told the service that he was looking for a job as a carpenter's apprentice-a rare job opening in a state like Connecticut where the construction industry is severely depressed. Mr. Rinaldi concedes he hasn't any experience as a carpenter but says he'd be happy to get such a job. However, his real interest was in remaining on unemployment. "If I said I wanted to be a parking lot attendant, they'd tell me to get a job," he asserts.

So, once every six weeks, Mr. Rinaldi goes to the unemployment compensation office in a depressed section of North Hartford and checks job openings as required by the state labor department before picking up his check. The rest of his checks are mailed to him and the remainder of his time is his own.

A spokesman for the Connecticut labor department, which administers the state's unemployment compensation, says that people collecting unemployment compensation are regularly informed of job openings and told to get job interviews. He asserts, "You can't sit for 65 weeks and wait for a job." He adds that applicants are thoroughly investigated. But sources familiar with the department admit that the system isn't equipped to deal with the huge number of clients it handles when unemployment is over 9%, as it has been in Connecticut.

Mr. Rinaldi says he has never been told of a job opening by the service or even asked whether he is actually looking.

On a typical winter day, Mr. Rinaldi says he gets up at 8 a.m., "so my parents won't think I'm a bum." On cold days he goes out and warms up his mothers car because her place in the garage has been supplanted by a battered 1951 Chevy panel truck which Mr. Rinaldi is sporadically storing. Some mornings he goes into the garage and fiddles with the vehicle but when his parents leave for work, he often returns to bed.

When he gets up again he eats and reads The Hartford Courant from cover to cover including obituaries, box scores and all the classified ads. "It's all right to be physically lazy. But I have to read something," he says. By the time he's through with the paper it's late afternoon and he can go out with some friends and have a few drinks. Evenings he often goes to various friends' homes or stays