DEPARTMENT OF LABOR, Hon. LISTER HILL, Chairman, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, DEAR MR. CHAIRMAN: This is in reply to your request for our views on S. 1321, a bill to provide for a National Service Corps to strengthen community service programs in the United States. As you may know, I appeared before the Subcommittee on Migatory Labor on May 28, 1963, and testified in support of the bill. I would appreciate your accepting my testimony (copy attached) before that subcommittee as expressing the views of the Department of Labor on the bill. Yours sincerely, W. WILLARD WIRTZ, EXPLANATION OF S. 1321 The major purpose of the proposed National Service Corps is to provide. through the dramatic but practical example set by a small corps of volunteers, the means of calling up the talents and idealism of large numbers of our citizens to assist the 32 million Americans who are socially and economically handicapped. Beginning with a small number of volunteers and a small number of projects, the National Service Corps would work with deprived groups including migrant laborers, American Indians, and refugees. Other fields in which the National Service Corps might work are health, mental health, education, and welfare in low economic areas and in correctional institutions. Volunteers would be provided only at the request of public or private agencies, State and local. Local agencies requesting National Service Corps personnel would first submit a plan demonstrating the need for and the usefulness of the project. When a plan is approved, corpsmen will work under the day-to-day supervision of the local sponsoring agency. The bill expressly provides that corpsmen shall not displace local staff or volunteer personnel, and that corps projects shall not duplicate or replace existing services. Rather the purpose will be to assist in meeting urgent manpower needs of the local agencies and institutions requesting corpsmen. Corpsmen's participation in any project will be for a limited time. The object will be to bring each project to a point at which local agency staff members or volunteers can take over permanently the tasks originally assigned to corpsmen. Corpsmen will receive no salaries as such. They will receive minimal living allowances, and a modest separation payment to ease their transition to civilian careers. The program would start with 150 to 300 men and women in early fall. Gradually expanding to the maximum authorized enrollments, the corps would reach 1,000 by the end of fiscal year 1964 and 5,000 in perhaps 3 years. The bill authorizes appropriations of $5 million for the first year and thereafter such amounts as the Congress may determine. The Corps' value would extend far beyond the authorized expenditure, in that it would stimulate increased local efforts to solve community problems. While a hundred or a thousand corpsmen obviously cannot answer the needs of millions, they will focus the attention of the public on the often-neglected problems of our poor and sick. The corpsmen will provide manpower for overburdened local organizations; and they will encourage and inspire local volunteers to do similar work. The goal of the Corps will be, by the efforts of a few, to ignite the energies of many. Senator WILLIAMS. Our very distinguished leadoff witness is Secretary Willard Wirtz, who has honored this subcommittee on other occasions with some of his most helpful testimony before the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. We all feel a very deep debt of gratitude as members of the Labor Committee, Members of the Senate, and citizens of this country that Secretary Wirtz is giving us the benefit of his great mind and talents and most understanding heart on the human problems that are faced in areas of poverty. We are happy to have Secretary Wirtz at this time. Secretary Wirtz, the forum is yours, and we look forward with great pleasure and anticipation to this opening statement on the National Service Corps, for which we have such high hopes. STATEMENT OF HON. W. WILLARD WIRTZ, SECRETARY OF LABOR; ACCOMPANIED BY DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POLICY DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH, AND SAMUEL V. MERRICK, SPECIAL ASSISTANT FOR LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS Secretary WIRTZ. Mr. Chairman, you realize how much I appreciate personally what you have said. I would just like to say that to whatever extent there is basis for any of your remarks, I find a full compensation in whatever I can bring to these programs and the opportunity to talk with you and with this committee about the Senate 1321, because I say to you in complete personal sincerity that I have come here in connection with no other legislative program which seems to me to have the possibility that S. 1321 has for identification with all that is in the hearts of those who are concerned with this great program. I have with me today Assistant Secretary Daniel P. Moynihan and Samuel V. Merrick, Special Assistant for Legislative Affairs. They have both been working on the development of this program. I would hope you would feel free to ask them, as well as me, any questions you have about it. I have, Mr. Chairman, filed a copy of my statement with the subcommittee, and if it suits the subcommittee's convenience, I shall be glad to simply summarize here the contents of this statement and then to respond to whatever questions there may be. Senator WILLIAMS. Very well. Secretary WIRTZ. The proposal S. 1321 it seems to me is properly summarized in terms of an identification of a set of needs in this country today which are probably not going to be met by the overall programs of one kind or another which are devised to meet the general problems in this area. I think of America as a great big giant, a powerful giant, a generous giant, a friendly and warm giant designed to meet as many human needs of the people as a Government can possibly meet. But the problem we are talking about today is the problem that arises in a form which is very hard for a giant to do anything about. If we were a small country, we probably would not be recommending the development of a National Service Corps because in one way or another we would feel confident that we could meet the little problems. But we are not a small country. We are a huge country, over 180 million people. What we are talking about here today and what is proposed in S. 1321 is an approach to those problems, those little human problems which a giant of a country is probably not going to be able to reach. We are in a way the victims as well as the beneficiaries of our growth and our success. Most of us are doing unbelievably well, which is what makes it so much harder to meet the kind of problems we are talking about here today. I rather think we can measure the accom plishments of any society in terms of what it does for its disadvantaged few, and that is what we are talking about here today. We have a tax program proposed, we have a manpower and development training program proposed. We have an education program proposed. We have a number of other programs proposed which will meet most of the problems in this country for most of the people in this country, but we come to the matter of the very few who for one reason or another, either as a result of perhaps what is their own fault or perhaps accident or perhaps circumstances over which they have no control, will not have their problems met by the other programs which we have brought into being. S. 1321 provides, as you know, for the establishment of a Corps, a volunteer Corps really, of people, young people, middle-aged people, old people, inexperienced people, and experienced people who want to identify themselves with a program of helping out individual persons in this country. From working with the programs which are part of the Department of Labor's responsibility, I know by bitter experience the inapplicability of some of those programs to the occasional individual who for one reason or another cannot bring himself under their benefits. S. 1321 would establish the National Service Corps to approach these problems not in terms of administering overall programs but in terms of meeting the needs of particular human individuals. I should like to point out to the committee what, as a matter of fact, I know is already familiar to it, that what we face today in this country is not a problem of overall depression-quite to the contrary. It is not a problem of overall need quite to the contrary. It is a situation where, on the other hand, disadvantage, poverty, want, lack of opportunity, all of these things are concentrated in particular pockets, pockets of poverty, pockets of disadvantage, pockets of lack of opportunity. There is, for example, concentration as far as the Nation's poverty is concerned, the concentration of the problem we have in several areas. There is the concentration of poverty in the rural areas in some situations and in particular so far as the migratory workers are concerned. I should like to take advantage of the opportunity to use a single illustration with respect to this matter, an illustration involving a current set of facts which illustrates for me what the National Service Corps could do. You will have noticed in the newspapers of two weeks ago the reports of a tragedy in Pohokee, Fla., a situation in which a bus was hit by a car, overturned, pushed in a canal. The bus had a capacity of 33 passengers but was carrying 43, almost all of them migratory farmworkers returning from the field where they worked that day. Twenty-seven were killed. There were 9 men, 5 women, 13 children, migratory workers or at least a group which can become a migratory group. The reports of that incident illustrates to me what cannot be reached as a matter of National, State, or local general policy but which could be met by the approach which could be taken under the National Service Corps. I pointed out first that there were 13 children in that bus. We don't know yet how many of them had worked that day. If they did work they probably should not have been working because of the age requirements. I don't know whether that is true or not. But there were some others in that bus only for the reason that the mothers had no place to leave them that day while they went out to work in the field. One of the reports of the story involves the question that was asked of one of the women, why the children were there. She answered, "We have no place to keep them. They go with us to the field. Most of them work, the others don't." That would suggest another overly sentimental part of that case perhaps. I can't get out of my mind the interview that the reporter had with one of the boys, a boy named Ernest Lee Howe, 12 years old. He got out of the bus, pushed the window open, swam to the surface of the canal and escaped. The reporter says of his conversation with this boy, "Tears were rolling down the boy's cheeks and he bit his lips as he stood with two women who brought him to identify his mother and two sisters reportedly dead and inside the bus." I simply want to ask what that boy's future is as far as this country is concerned? A 12-year-old boy from a migratory worker group, loses the rest of his family in this particular incident. I don't believe that a revision of the tax laws or the development of the manpower training act or the development of a new education program is going to pick up the case of Ernest Lee Howe. I suspect that we are going to have to do it through a much more person-to-person individualized kind of approach than any of these broad laws will permit. I suspect there is a real role for the National Service Corps man and for the group he can develop in meeting the problems of the migratory laborer which some of us have been trying so hard to meet but which we know we have not yet met and even if we pass the general laws we have in mind we won't be able to meet completely. If there were a National Service Corps group which could work on the problems of the migratory workers, which by their very nature defy the abilities of particular communities to meet them, we might get ahead on this particular problem. We are thinking in terms of the National Service Corps meeting the problems of pockets of poverty in the rural areas which are illustrated by the migratory workers. I think of the pocket of poverty in the Appalachian region today. We have the Area Redevelopment Act and we are doing a great deal with it in the Appalachian region to meet the problems which are posed there. Yet we know that there are too many people in that area who are today beyond the reach of the Area Redevelopment Act. The situation in terms of a particular family's circumstances is such that those peoples' problems will not be met by any general overall statutes. I think they can be met by a group of volunteers who go into an area to work with the people in that area, not to administer an overall program, but to take the cases as they find them and to devise ways and means of meeting the human problem which they will present. That is what we are talking about in the proposal for the National Service Corps. I think then, next, of the pockets of poverty in the large urban areas. We are doing a lot about the problems in the slums. We can tear down the old buildings, and we can build new buildings, and that will increase the economic level in the area. Somebody has to tackle the problem about what to do about working out the relocation plans for the individuals in those areas. I mention that only as one of the human problems that come along in the wake of or along with the economic development which we are pressing so hard. These are problems which require the person-to-person, individualized kind of approach which the National Service Corps can take. I think of pockets of poverty that exist, as a final illustration in this series, in the Indian reservations in this country. There are programs again devised to meet those problems. We know, too, at the same time a good many of those situations involve individual cases which can be met in individual terms. Besides the pockets of poverty in this country today are the pockets of denial of opportunity, and I think here particularly it falls within the responsibility of the Department of Labor along with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare of what we are calling the school dropout problem. A good deal of the school dropout problem can and will be met through the invigoration of the economy as the result, I hope, of changes in the tax problem, through the development of the administration of the Manpower Development and Training Act, through, I hope, the enactment and the administration of the Youth Employment Act. There will remain those among the dropout group who, for one reason or another, have lost completely at this point not only opportunity but motivation to do something about the improvement of their future. I think of the situation, because I know it best, in the city of Chicago. There, the most specific gain which has been made on the school dropout problem, in my judgment, is the gain from the program which has been worked out by entirely volunteer amateur groups which have enlisted a number of the graduate students at the universities of Northwestern and Chicago and have worked out programs whereby these college students, among the advantaged of this country, go over into the several wards, the river wards in Chicago, where the school dropout problem is the worst. They take one by one the school dropouts there and work out programs with them so that you have a university student spending two or three nights a week over in the river wards working with just one or two of these gang members, whatever they may be, to try to bring them back into a life of usefulness; trying to get them back in the school, where it is appropriate; trying to teach them the A B C's where they don't have it; trying one way or another to meet those problems which a giant of a nation simply cannot and will not meet. I say to you, I think in connection with the meeting of the school dropout problem, there is a role which will never be played through the administration of overall programs and will have to be worked out on this person-to-person basis. Then I think, third, of the pockets of disadvantaged, of handicapped, which are illustrated by the situation of the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped, and others of the same kind. By action of the Senate yesterday there is illustrated the possibility of taking care of a good deal of a problem of this kind such as the mental retardation problem through general overall administrative programs with the knowledge there will fall through the meshes of a program of that kind a few whose problems will have to be taken up on the basis of their particular circumstances and their individual disadvantage. |