Among the Federal agencies whose work is essential in the job creation programs is the Economic Development Administration. The EDA's regional planning groups, already underway in five regions, must be extended to other poverty areas. B. Upgrading the rural labor force

Educational and training facilities available to rural residents have been seriously deficient in both quantity and quality as compared with those in urban communities. The means for overcoming these inadequacies is being provided by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the Vocational Education Act of 1963. Some new area vocational technical schools are in operation, but a great many more are needed. At the same time, more realistic school curriculum planning is called for, particularly at the secondary school level, if rural youth are to keep pace with changing job needs.

The Department recognizes that MDTA occupational training of unemployed rural workers should be expanded. Such training together with needed supportive services should be directed particularly at migratory farm workers, operators of small farms, and other rural people who face especially difficult poblems in the changing agricultural economy. More intensive training and job development services will be effected through the interagency coordination system described below. It is also anticipated that as the Concentrated Employment Program is expanded, more rural areas will be included.

C. The concentrated employment program

In March of this year, the President directed the Secretary of Labor, in cooperation with the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity to begin a concentrated employment program to provide jobs and training for those who need help most, both in the slum areas of our cities and in target rural areas. The Department of Labor has, as a result of this directive, been engaged in an intensified effort to develop and fund concentrated employment programs in several cities and in three rural areas-the Mississippi Delta, the Upper Michigan Peninsula, and Eastern Kentucky. These programs are designed to combine under one sponsor and in a single contract all of those manpower programs and services that are necessary to help an individual move from unemployability and dependence to self-sufficiency in a permanent job that utilizes the individual's potential.

In addition to the placement of individuals in youth and adult work experience programs this involves a vigorous effort to develop jobs in the private sector of the economy and a commitment to back up that effort with whatever supportive services are necessary to make each individual fully productive. Not only does the program involve mobilization of all of the community resources, but it represents a concentrated effort that focuses on a specific target group.

It is expected that the program will be expanded to other rural areas in the next fiscal year, providing funds become available.

D. Research: Areas of challenge

One area of particular concern to us is the question of whether in the years ahead there will be an adequate supply of agricultural manpower to meet various crop needs which still require relatively large amounts of labor. This concern is shared by the National Council of Agricultural Employees and other agricultural groups in view of the rigid controls on the importation of foreign workers. It should be emphasized that we do not foresee impending local shortages of labor either now or in the near future. At the same time, we must be continually alert to those factors or situations which might present some labor supply problems in connection with specific areas and crops.

As an immediate outgrowth of this concern, the Manpower Administration recently sponsored a series of regional farm labor meetings to encourage research studies by the universities and other private research organizations as a supplement to governmental research activity. Specialists within our own Department and the Department of Agriculture as well as representatives of appropriate State agencies were joined by experts in the academic community and private consulting firms with a technical knowledge of farm manpower problems. As a result we have already received several stimulating research ideas.

For example, we are considering one study that will examine the recruitment problem many farmers face in obtaining sufficient part- and full-time workers— unskilled as well as skilled-a need which becomes especially critical at seasonal or peak periods.

A related study will investigate the problems of underutilization, mismatched supply and demand, and low income in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. This

proposal would attempt a comprehensive analysis of the farm industry in this area in order to determine the details of unemployment, underemployment, and labor mobility which characterize its labor force; to isolate the problems that hinder the upgrading of skills; and to formulate short- and long-run alternative policy recommendations for the relief of these problems.

We hope that the research we support will suggest alternative local farm manpower programs and policies by which not only peak seasonal demands for labor in local areas can better be met, but also to provide more year round employment opportunities and adequate income for workers who remain in farming.

E. Program coordination

Rural manpower programs are fragmented among a host of public and private agencies-Federal, State, and local. These programs need to be coordinated at every level if the limited resources available are to be fully utilized.

A promising move toward a more formally coordinated approach to the planning and development of all types of work-training, basic education, occupational skill training and other related programs administered by the various Federal agencies was taken this spring in the development of the new Comprehensive Area-State Manpower Planning System initiated under Department of Labor leadership. In cooperation with the Departments of Commerce, HEW, HUD, Labor and OEO, a system has been designed to put into the hands of State and local agencies information about all program resources expected to be available to them in this coming fiscal year so that they will be able to lay out integrated programs for deploying these resources against the most pressing manpower problems.

On a national basis, this coordinated planning approach should make possible steady progress toward optimum allocation of resources in developing the potenialities and improving the utilizaton of unemployed and underemployed manpower in our rural and urban areas. With this major stride toward more sophisticated planning at the local level, it is expected that the problems of rural workers can be accommodated more readily. Indeed, the Department of Labor is currently holding conferences with the Department of Agriculture to bring that agency within the umbrella of the new planning system. This will enable the vast resources of that agency-so intimately concerned with the rural population— to be more readily integrated with those of Federal agencies providing direct programs for employment rehabilitation of our most seriously disadvantaged citizens.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. I shall take just a few minutes to summarize it, and then respond to any questions that you may have.

Certainly, within the last 3 years there have been more programs and more executive action taken to assist rural America in its economic development than in the previous three decades. Various activities have been carried on by various Government departments, some programs like Public Law 78 have terminated and the problem of providing domestic farmworkers has become an issue.

Our Farm Labor Service has extended its assistance to migratory farmworkers to provide year around employment, and to assist farm employers in meeting their manpower needs.

Our Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training, over the years, has had youth development and training programs in many rural areas affecting many rural individuals.

The State employment services have provided counseling and placement services to rural residents.

There have been activities in Appalachia amongst the disadvantaged individuals and with the Indian population in many parts of the United States.

In recent years there have been specific pieces of legislation enacted which would help in developing rural America. More specifically, as far as the Department of Labor is concerned, there was the original

Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 which, has been replaced by the Public Works and Economic Development Act, that provided not only for the economic development of areas of substantial unemployment and rural areas where farm income was less than $1,200 per capita, but also provided, so far as the Department of Labor is concerned, for training to be given to individuals in these areas, to assist them in developing their skills and abilities to become employable. The Area Redevelopment Act was followed by the Manpower Development and Training Act passed in mid-1962 and administered by the Department of Labor jointly with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This added a new dimension to the struggle for a healthier and more prosperous rural America. We have conducted these manpower development and training programs, and I will have more to say about that in a moment, in all the States of the Union and in many of the rural areas within those States.

I would like to pass over, if I may, to page 4 and begin to review some of the specific programs that the Department of Labor is engaged in.

The first that I note are the recent developments in the U.S. Employment Service. As you know, the U.S. Employment Service is part of the Bureau of Employment Security, which is part of the Department of Labor and operates the Federal-State employment security system with 2,000 offices throughout the United States.

One of the major activities of the Employment Service has been in what is called the smaller communities program. This is a program where, because the areas are small, it is uneconomical to provide a full-time Employment Service office. Thus, the Employment Service developed a mobile team and moves it out into the rural areas where it remains frequently from 2 to 3 months in that rural area, doing an economic survey, doing a survey of employment needs, a survey of the abilities of the population, the background of the population, the labor force components and so forth, and works with the community in providing jobs and training opportunities and making referrals to other agencies for supporting services to enhance the employability of the individual. This is a program that has been going on now for 2 years and intensified more specifically in the last year.

An extension of this notion that we have recently had, as a result of an executive order of the President and of the discussions of a committee of the Department of Agrirculture jointly with the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Department of HUD, the Small Business Administration, and the Labor Department, has been to move these agencies into three States in a concerted effort to expand and improve manpower development in the rural areas.

The three experimental States that were chosen where Arkansas, Minnesota, and New Mexico.

There are some very interesting developments in that experiment that now have had a year's operation. The success that has flowed from it encourages us to think that if there were additional resources available, this would be one additional way to bring to rural America. many of the programs available in Federal legislation.

Second, at the bottom of page 5, I refer to a new program which we have been engaged in for the last 2 years, a labor mobility relocation

program. This is authorized, again on an experimental demonstration basis, by the Manpower Development and Training Act. And there have been proposals to train rural workers and to move them to urban areas, on the one hand, and there have been also proposals to move surplus rural agricultural workers from one surplus rural area to an area where there is a shortage of domestic agricultural labor. Mr. RESNICK. May I interrupt?

Mr. RUTTENBERG. Certainly.

Mr. RESNICK. Whatever happened to that particular program put into effect a year and a half ago. There was a very severe shortage of domestic farm labor, especially in dairying. There are literally hundreds of thousands of displaced workers in the Southern States and I find it very difficult to understand why nothing has been done.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. I am going to come to that in just a moment in terms of the work of the Farm Labor Service and the annual workers plan, and the interstate recruitment program. But I might just in this context of labor mobility, indicate, for example, a very interesting recent project which has been developed jointly by the Department of Labor with three States, Mississippi and Louisiana on the one hand, being surplus labor agricultural rural States, and the State of Iowa, on the other hand, being a State where a great need exists for rural workers in certain areas. They are going to be relocated in the State of Iowa, primarily for agricultural jobs, from Mississippi and Louisiana.

We have conducted various similar programs for example, from northern Minnesota down to southern Minnesota. We have conducted programs from West Virginia into other areas of the country. This is strictly an experimental program; that is, it is funded to test out whether a long-range relocation and mobility program is practical within the United States.

As you know, most of the European countries have quite extensive relocation programs with great shortages of labor.

We have found in the last 3 years that we have operated this relocation program that it does have great merit, and we will be coming to the Congress with specific recommendations to extend the experimental demonstration program.

Mr. RESNICK. I would like to point out that these people are being relocated, in order to find jobs. The problem is the people are being relocated from the southern areas into our urban areas.

I know that in my district there is a shortage of help on the dairy farms. It appears to me that this problem requires study and where a program, such as the one we have mentioned, would be applicable. Mr. RUTTENBERG. I could not agree more thoroughly. As I understand it, one of the points that Secretary Freeman made yesterday in appearing before you is one which we would wholeheartedly endorse: that is, if you could just retrain the rural workers in performing the agricultural responsibilities that are there, this would reduce the urban problem substantially.

One of the big problems, as we all know, is the urban slums and the rural workers wanting to go to the city. When they get to the city, they are not nearly as well off as they were out on the farms, but yet they are in the cities, and that is where they want to

migrate to, and they create all kinds of serious problems, and we, therefore, adopt economic and manpower programs to assist the cities, among other things, the cities' unemployment problem is augmented by the inmigration of rural workers.

In another section, on page 6, I discuss our work with American Indians. Recently, in cooperation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior, we conducted a national conference dealing with Indian problems in Kansas City where 200 tribal leaders were present from 25 States, working on the problem of providing training and employment and work opportunities for the American Indians.

Now, on page 7, I refer to the Farm Labor Service, which is a part of the Bureau of Employment Security of the Manpower Administration, Department of Labor. They provide employment service facilities to the farm employers and farmworkers throughout the United States.

Beginning on page 8, I refer to the annual workers plan which is being extended quite significantly by providing workers in the migrant stream, in scheduling them in such a way that they have a maximum work opportunity throughout the whole season and our moving them on, so that they meet the labor demands in other areas and in this way maintain a full work-year.

You know that the Department of Labor has been actively engaged in recruiting farm labor for those employers who meet certain standards in regulations promulgated by the Secretary of Labor, which have recently been amended. These regulations require a more adequate housing by farm employers as one of the criteria for interstate recruitment of workers, and that has worked fairly well.

On page 9, I make reference to the problem which you gentlemen are familiar with; namely, the procurement of the use of farm labor and the expiration in December 1964, of Public Law 78, and subsequently a promulgation by the Secretary of Labor of standards and regulations governing the certification of the importation of foreign workers under the Immigration and Naturalization Act. I think that we have had considerable success in demonstrating that there are substantial numbers of domestic workers that the available in agriculture, even without the presence of foreign workers and even in periods of time when unemployment has been declining as it has been declining over the past 5 years. And, as a matter of fact, since 1964, with a substantial decline in unemployment, the number of domestic farm workers employed has gone up, and we have not had the serious problems that were predicted that would flow if Public Law 78 were permitted to expire.

Next, on the bottom of page 9, I refer to the Manpower Development and Training Act. This is, as you know, an act to provide training opportunities for unemployed and underemployed individuals. Special efforts have been made to promote training opportunities in rural communities where low income and other economic deficiencies prevail. A major effort is being made by our State employment agencies now to extend MDTA to rural workers, to place a full-time person in each State agency as a rural manpower training specialist to see that the program gets out into the rural communities to do prescisely, Mr.