Jacksonville, Florida-Buffalo, Phoenix, Baltimore, Birmingham. And then four rural areas the Mississippi Delta, Eastern Kentucky, Northern Minnesota and Northern Michigan. I should make it clear that this third grouping is a very heterogeneous grouping, and there have been various degrees of exploration of the possibilities in these areas. This third grouping is also affected by the fact that some of these areas, particularly the rural areas, are the objects of other concentrated attack as part of the Economic Development Act program and other programs in the government. In two or three of these cases there have been fairly extensive preliminary explorations but not enough yet to let us be certain that we can do much about it. Just one more word about how these areas have been selected. They have been selected with a combination of two sets of considerations. First, the information which we have available indicating the degree of concentration of the unemployment situation. That has been done as precisely as it cap be done on limited information. And there has been taken into account along with that the local situation as it holds out promise or lack of promise as far as the participation of the local agencies and authorities concerned. So that we have taken those situations-those cases in which the situation appeared most acute and those situations in which there appeared to be the prospect of largest help as far as the established agencies are concerned. Now of the program which we have in mind, emphasizing again that it involves no new programming-it involves a very significant factor of concentration of the older programming. We will be working in most cases through and with the Community Action agencies in a particular area. We will do that wherever it is practicable, and in most of these cases it is or will be. There will be the combination of the services of the Employment Service in that area and the Community Action Agency-along with the services, where this is involved, of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the representatives of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There is a not yet fully formed pattern of team representation from the Washington agencies working with the local agencies under the direction in each case of someone from the Department of Labor. What we will do will be set up a program with definite outlines based on concrete proposals from the local agencies worked out through our offices here which will have simply one common basic factor in them, and that will be that we are going to take the hard cases first, and this program will be concentrated entirely on those cases which present the largest difficulty in individual terms of employment of the individuals who remain unemployed. We will try to work out a program which will fit in general into this pattern. There will be an intensive effort made to reach out for and to find those people in these specified areas who are most in need of training or work, or work training arrangements. They will be brought in for what will in most cases be a two-week kind of general orientation or preparation or sifting program. During those two weeks, we will be working with them on an individual basiswith people assigned pretty much on a one-for-two basis. We will add to our staffs in the Employment Service and in the Community Action Agencies, special persons who will be called, depending on the local useage, counsellors or coaches, or whatever it may be, and each one of them will be working with twenty of these individuals. They will be working with her or him in the sense of taking them through that two-week course, and then trying to route them as directly as possible to one of the following places: to direct employment; into whatever training program best fits that individual; or to school-wherever that seems the effective thing to do. It will be another part of this program that we will be working with, much more closely than we have been before-local employer and labor union groupsso that it will be an essential part of this program that with the cooperation of the employer and the union groups we will try to line up specific job opportunities which have been closed to people of this kind before. We will ask employers to take a chance and to help in the training which is necessary as far as this group is concerned. To be specific and illustrative, if there is somebody who has a prison record, we will be asking employers to take into consideration the possibility of whatever rehabilitation there is here, and whatever advantage can come from our offering to work with the employer and the individual on a quite personalized basis. But the much more usual case will be that of the individual who does not have the training for the particular vacancy, because what these surveys show is that there are a large number of remaining unemployed, there are a large number of job vacancies, and the two just do not match. And we will be trying to bridge that particular-to get across that particular difficulty. You will ask-and properly-what our expectations are as far as the program is concerned in terms of numbers. We hope, with the remaining funds unappropriated so far this year-we hope to set into effect, into operation, programs in this group of cities, whatever size it may be, which will mean that in the next six months we can open doors to between 25,000 and 40,000 individuals to whom they would not be opened. This is not the total program by any means. This is the extra which will be possible in these particular areas in that period. I think it is a reasonable prospect, on the basis of what experience and information we have so far, that that goal can be met. I do not say there will be an additional 25,000 to 40,000 people employed. There will be an additional 25,000 to 40,000 pcople who are given every single opportunity that can be brought to them. And I think, from the experience we have had so far, that the experience will be relatively satisfactory in terms of these results. results. Now, that is in general the kind of an approach that we have in mind. I repeat that it has no brand new elements in it. It has some pretty concrete lessons of experience, and those are particularly the need for individualized attention to the remaining cases of unemployment and also the much larger participation of the private groups in these programs. Senator RIBICOFF. Now, the report said, and I read from the report: "The subemployment rate for the 10 survey areas taken as a whole is 33.9 percent. This means that 1 out of every 3 residents in the slums has a serious employment problem." The report gave the subemployment figures for 10 slum areas ranging from 24.2 percent in Boston to 47.4 percent in San Antonio. The Department's report entitled "A Sharper Look at Unemployment in U.S. Cities and Slums," was released on March 15. At this point I would like to place that report in the record. (The document referred to follows:) |