Special Message to the Congress: the Manpower Report of the President

To the Congress of the United States:

We in America have come far toward the achievement of a free economy that realizes the full potential of each individual member of its work force.

It is in no sense a matter of chance or fortune that we have come this far. The ideal of full employment, in the large sense that each individual shall become all that he is capable of becoming, and shall contribute fully to the well being of the Nation even as he fully shares in that well being, is at the heart of our democratic belief. If we have never achieved that ideal, neither have we ever for long been content to fall short of it. We have measured ourselves by the persistence of our effort to meet the standard of the full development and use of our human resources. As we still fall short of that standard, we are still not satisfied.

This first Manpower Report to the Congress is couched in terms of immediate problems and specific proposals to meet them. But however separate these problems may seem, collectively they represent the gap between our manpower performance and our objective of the flail use of our human resources: The steps I propose are necessary to achieve that objective. It is within our power to take these steps; and in that measure it is within our power to consummate an achievement of such magnitude as to mark this decade for all time in the history of human progress.

Unemployment is our number one economic problem. It wastes the lives of men and women, depriving both them and the Nation. Our continued under use of human and physical capacity is costing us some $30 to $40 billion of additional goods and services annually. This means a considerably lower standard of living than we would otherwise enjoy. More seriously--ominously--it means we are doing less than our best in staffing ourselves in the struggle for freedom at home and abroad that now commands our energies and resources on an unprecedented scale, and in ever more demanding forms.

For each of the past 5 years now the rate of unemployment has averaged 5 1/2 percent or more. This has resulted largely from a slowing down of the rate of economic growth. During the period 1947-57 nonfarm employment increased an average of 1.9 percent a year, or about 900,000 jobs annually. At this rate, the economy was nearly keeping pace with the increase in the work force (as it was at that time) and could accommodate most changes in the structure of employment. Since 1957, however, employment has increased an average of only 0.9 percent a year. This is less than half a million additional jobs a year--not nearly enough to keep up. The changing structure of employment, from manufacturing production to private and public services, may be seen from the singular fact that nearly two-thirds of the new jobs added to the economy in the past 5 years have been in State and local government, for the most part in teaching.

We cannot accept this situation. The first imperative is to release and stimulate those consumer and investment forces that create the demand for work. An economy that is rapidly expanding will provide both increased opportunity for employment and an environment in which the benefits of technological advance can be had without undue disruption. I have proposed that major tax changes be initiated this year to inject additional demand and provide increased incentives to fuel an upsurge in production and employment.

At the same time, we must act to improve the functioning and structure of our labor markets, and the quality of preparation of our manpower for the occupational needs of tomorrow.

Growth and change in manpower requirements vary by industry, occupation, and area, as do changes wrought by technology and by other powerful forces. Our manpower resources also grow irregularly: Skills, age distribution, and other characteristics are in constant flux. Public policies must encourage and facilitate the adjustments made necessary by the ever-changing pattern of job requirements. Private industry and trade unions must also exercise initiative and responsibility to adapt jobs and employment practices to make the fullest use of manpower resources, and to do so in a humane and efficient manner.

BACKGROUND FOR MANPOWER POLICY

Manpower is the basic resource. It is the indispensable means of convening other resources to mankind's use and benefit. How well we develop and employ human skills is fundamental in deciding how much we will accomplish as a nation.

The manner in which we do so will, moreover, profoundly determine the kind of nation we become. Nothing more exactly identifies the totalitarian or closed society than the rigid and, more often than not, brutish direction of labor at all levels. Typically, this is done in a quest for efficiency that is never attained. By contrast, it is our contention that public and private policies which facilitate free and prudent choices by individuals as to where and at what they shall work will, in the end, produce by far the most efficient, as well as the only morally acceptable, distribution of manpower.

Education and training are indispensable elements that give meaning to the free choice of occupation. From its first beginning the American national government has followed policies designed to raise the level of education and training in the Nation, and to ensure that it should be available to all citizens. The Continental Congress, by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, provided funds from land sales to support a system of free public education. During the Civil War the system of land grant colleges was begun that has since produced some of our mightiest universities and an incomparable network of institutions of higher learning. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 established Federal support for vocational education. The vast program of educational assistance for veterans which followed World War II enormously influenced the levels of education and skill of the postwar American work force. More recently, the National Science Foundation Act and the National Defense Education Act have further contributed to educational development.

Private actions have been supplemented in other ways to meet manpower challenges of the past. Through homestead legislation our government encouraged individual mobility and initiative in the settling of the frontier. Through the early state labor standards legislation for women and minors, factory safety legislation, the workmen's compensation statutes now half a century old, and through other measures, the policies of government have moderated the strains of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. Through immigration policies, we expanded and enriched our manpower resources to accelerate growth. Through comprehensive welfare and labor legislation in the depressed 1930's, we sustained and invigorated the labor force and promoted the employment of present and prospective members of the labor force.

In our more recent past, following the close of World War II, national concern with the overriding importance of balancing people and jobs led Congress to adopt the Employment Act of 1946, which called upon the Government "to promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power."

With the enactment of the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, Congress went further to declare that an effective full employment policy also requires a major national effort to improve the functioning of the labor market and the quality and adaptability of the labor force. The act also includes the request for an annual Presidential Report on "manpower requirements, resources utilization, and training." Together, these provisions mark the emergence of the manpower program as a specific instrument of national policy.

Manpower policy looks not only to the short run, but to the future in terms of generations. The lead time for the production of many professional skills must be thought of in terms of a decade or more. Things we do or fail to do this year will, for example, significantly affect--in some ways irrevocably-the supply of physicians in the 1980's.

The fundamental relation of manpower policy to economic policy has been emphatically demonstrated by economists studying the nature of economic growth. More and more, these studies point to the improvement in the quality of human resources as a major source of increased production. Thus it has been calculated by one authority that for the period 1929 to 1957 the improved education of the work force accounted for more than one-fifth of the increase in real national product. This was a larger share than that provided for by the increase in capital investment. Education combined with the advance of knowledge accounted altogether for about two-fifths of national growth during this period. Clearly, our manpower program must be designed not only to balance the needs and resources of the present but also to project those needs and resources so that current investment in manpower is shaped to future needs.

RECENT TRENDS

From 1953 to 1962 investment in scientific research and development tripled. The rapid flow of technological innovation promises a future in which material want is all but unknown. But this future can only be reached by change, often with dislocation. In the process, the manpower requirements of the Nation will be profoundly altered.

Such changes are already evidenced in the increasing premium placed on skilled labor, and the diminishing need for unskilled labor. New technology, along with shifts in consumer demands and defense needs, has resulted in obsolescence of some industries, plants, products, and processes, and has generated meteoric growth of others--with accompanying geographic dislocations as well.

The slow rate of growth in recent years and the accompanying limited availability of new jobs have sharpened adverse effects of unemployment and skill dislocations. The shortage of jobs has also placed a serious strain on collective bargaining procedures. In the absence of strong economic expansion, the "job security" issue has been setting off labor-management disputes, for business is unable to furnish new job opportunities for those adversely affected by technology and workers are fearful of the future with their old jobs threatened and new ones not in sight. Expanding growth will ease such disputes, slow the decline of shrinking industries, and enlarge the demand for manpower in expanding sectors of the economy.

Along with the slowing growth rate and limited availability of new jobs, there have developed major declines in employment in goods-producing activities. Manufacturing employed r million fewer production workers (7 1/2 percent less) in 1962 than a scant half-dozen years earlier, although output was increased nearly 20 percent. Agricultural employment has been declining for many years by about 200,000 a year. In mining, over a fifth of total employment has disappeared since just 1957.

The employment increases which did occur have come in service activities, but not at a pace fast enough to offset these declines and at the same time to provide adequate opportunities for newcomers to the labor force. Much of the growth has been in hiring of part-time workers. Moreover, employment increases in the trade sector have been slowing down in the last half-dozen years.

Occupationally, the new technology has been altering manpower requirements in favor of occupations requiring more education and training. In the earlier decades of this century, technological change developed mass-production, mass-assembly techniques, with great expansion in opportunities for semiskilled workers with relatively little education. In the fifties, the new technology was increasingly devoted to automating production and materials-handling processes, with concomitant increased demand for more highly trained and skilled manpower and lessened demand for workers in semiskilled occupations. The signs in the early sixties are that extension of automatic data processing is also limiting manpower needs in some office and clerical occupations, further compounding problems of adjustment.

These developments have not been ignored, but neither has there been any widespread awareness of their speed and magnitude. Private and public actions to meet changing manpower requirements have not proceeded with the sense of urgency warranted by the circumstances. Existing education, training, and labor market institutions have not kept pace with the demands of the new technology.

As a consequence of limited growth and inadequate response to change, unemployment rates have moved up. This has occurred despite the unusually small number of youngsters entering the work force--a reflection of the low birth rates of the depression years of the 1930's. From less than 3 percent unemployment in 1953, the year the Korean hostilities ended, the rate of unemployment has virtually doubled, remaining at an average of 5 1/2 percent or more in each of the last 5 years.

The accompanying report of the Secretary of Labor presents detailed data on the manpower trends of the recent past and on current employment and unemployment levels.

CURRENT SITUATION

I must emphasize again, our foremost manpower concern is the lack of adequate growth in employment opportunities. The nation is wasting an intolerably large proportion of its human resources through unemployment and underemployment.

Although 1962 saw a significant improvement over 1961, during the year an average of 4 million workers--5.6 percent of our labor force--were unemployed and another 2.7 million who wanted full-time employment could find only part-time work. The total loss was 6.7 percent of the potentially available work-time.

These losses amounted to a billion workdays. If distributed over the entire work force at one time, rather than borne by the minority wholly or partly unemployed during the year, the lost work-time would have been equal to shutting the country down-with no production, no services, no pay-for over 3 weeks.

Because it is spread in bits and pieces and unequal loads, the impact is less observable, less troubling to the Nation's sense of husbandry than a concentrated shutdown--but it is nonetheless tragically wasteful. Some frictional unemployment is inevitable in a dynamic economy, but our present rates are far above that level and, as is well known, substantially higher than the unemployment rates of most other industrialized countries.

During 1962 about 14 million different Americans had some period of unemployment. For most it was temporary, often seasonal or for voluntary job change reasons; their interlude between jobs ended quickly with reemployment in a few weeks. But for over 4 million people, unemployment was a prolonged affliction. Their job seeking stretched for 15 weeks or longer. For many of them the new job still has not come. At last count, 1 million Americans were still seeking work after 15 or more weeks of unemployment.

The costs of prolonged unemployment are high. The individual and society both suffer--the individual through cuts in income, depletion or elimination of savings, hardship for family, erosion of unused skills, and sickness of spirit which may be lastingly harmful--and society through unrealized output, reduced demand, and the social costs of poverty.

The impact of unemployment is uneven. In addition to expanded economic growth, special measures are necessary to better adapt manpower supply and utilization to changing requirements. Among minority racial groups, for example, the incidence of unemployment is more than twice that for white workers. Discrimination bars qualified persons from access to job opportunities, and following upon unequal access of many to educational and apprenticeship opportunities, it has led to a wholly disproportionate concentration of nonwhites in unskilled and semiskilled occupations, which are of course those most susceptible to unemployment.

Discrimination against nonwhites, primarily Negroes, results in an estimated annual waste of $17 billion of production and services, in addition to the sizeable human and social costs involved.

The brunt of unemployment is also unevenly divided geographically. Although every part of the country has communities with particularly heavy unemployment, in January 1963 unemployment was greater than 6 percent in 44 of the Nation's 150 major labor market areas; 2 years earlier, in January 1961, it had been greater than 6 percent in 76 such areas. Hundreds of smaller localities continue at high unemployment rates. Areas in which unemployment has been substantial and has also persisted for at least several years have an eighth of the Nation's work force, but nearly a quarter of its unemployment.

In addition to unemployment, there are other serious failures to make full use of available manpower resources. Employment which fails to use a worker's full ability or available work-time is a principal form of underutilization. Much of our agriculture is particularly characterized by such underemployment; the estimated underemployment of all male agricultural workers alone is equivalent to the full-time unemployment of a million workers.

Also wasted are the valuable contributions which could be made by many persons willing to work but who do not actively seek employment because job opportunities do not exist for them. This hidden underemployment is most prominent for three broad groups:

--older persons, below and above normal retirement age, still capable of effective performance, and who still wish to work full or part time.

--women, who have home responsibilities, but who want and could perform suitably scheduled full- or part-time work.

--handicapped workers who, particularly in consequence of recent advances in medical and rehabilitation knowledge, can capably perform many jobs despite present or past physical or mental difficulties.

The trend in youth unemployment demands special concern and action. Alarming numbers of our youth lack work opportunities as well as the educational preparation necessary for a rewarding adult life.

One of every seven youngsters between the ages of 16 and 21 now out of school is also out of work. Both lack of work opportunity and lack of suitable preparation are involved in this situation--and are combining to spread frustration and disillusion among large numbers of young people.

Our educational level is the highest in our history, but it will have to advance at a faster rate to keep pace with the growing complexities of the scientific age. From 3 to 4 of every 10 of our children are dropping out of school before completing even a high school education. Almost 9 of every 10 fall short of a college education. Even for those in school, the education received is often out of step with rising skill and versatility requirements of our advanced economy.

Early in my administration, I designated qualified groups to explore these problems intensively. The resulting findings, of my Committee on Youth Employment and of the Panel of Consultants on Vocational Education, document the seriousness of the situation. Their recommendations underlie the remedial steps which I have proposed to the Congress.

Despite the large supply of unused manpower, serious shortages exist in essential occupations.

At the same time that many workers are out of work, some jobs remain unfilled because they require different skills from those possessed by the unemployed, because of insufficient awareness of available jobs, or because of inadequate mobility among the unemployed. Existing labor market mechanisms and educational programs have not overcome the imbalance of requirements and resources. Our means for matching workers with jobs need improvement.

Shortages of qualified workers are particularly widespread in scientific, engineering, teaching, health, and other professional and technical fields, because expansion in scientific research, greater education and health needs have led to increased demand for such manpower. These ordinarily are not occupations toward which unemployed workers can be directed. Extensive education and training are needed for such demands; the supply of well-trained personnel cannot be built up overnight from existing unemployed manpower resources.

In many areas, specific clerical, service, and skilled occupations also require more manpower. The need for improved identification of such occupational demands, and for corresponding improvement in education, training, and labor market functioning is compelling.

FUTURE TRENDS

Looming ahead are developments which indicate the dimensions of the manpower tasks before us.

1. The number of new job-seekers will be growing much faster. The net growth of the labor force in the sixties is expected to be about 13 million, more than 50 percent greater than in the fifties.

Unless the growth of new job opportunities is also accelerated, unemployment totals will rise. If in the next 5 years we provide new employment at the pace of the last 5, by 1967 unemployment will come to over 5 1/2 million, or more than 7 percent of the 1967 labor force.

2. The number of young jobseekers will rise at an unprecedented rate. The huge number of children born in the years following World War II are just now beginning to enter the labor market.

In the years ahead the labor market will be flooded by young people. In 1960, 2,600,000 persons turned 18 in the United States. Two years from now, in 1965, the number reaching that age will have increased by almost 50 percent--so that 3,800,000 will turn 18 that year. Never since the peak years of immigration at the end of the 19th century has the United States enjoyed so extraordinary an infusion of young, vigorous workers.

3. Manpower requirements will increasingly have to be met by younger and older workers, with corresponding training adjustments. In addition to the larger numbers of young workers, during the 1960's the number of workers over 45 will also increase--in this case by more than 5 million. The number of workers in the 35 to 44 age groups will actually decline, as the number moving out of this age bracket will exceed those entering it.

These facts only add to the importance of eliminating for good all the wasteful discrimination against older workers that is to be encountered in many areas of the economy. Much progress has been made in demonstrating clearly that older workers can be effective in jobs from which they have been barred. It is nonetheless certain that older workers, especially the unskilled, will continue to have difficulty finding new jobs when they are laid off. It is the policy of the Government to take energetic action to enable our older workers to continue in active employment if they want work and are able to work. In my recent Message on Aiding Our Senior Citizens, I have outlined measures to promote employment opportunities for them and directed the President's Council on Aging to undertake a searching reappraisal of their employment problem.

4. Skill requirements are changing and rising rapidly. The most rapid job growth will be in occupations requiring higher skills. The growing needs of our research and development programs in civilian, defense and space technology require particularly sharp rises in highly trained scientific, engineering and supporting technical manpower.

Estimates of future requirements indicate that new entrants into engineering will have to be substantially increased, particularly at advanced levels, and utilization of present engineers must be improved, to meet growth and replacement requirements in the profession in the 1960's.

More than 2 million elementary and secondary school teachers must be trained or reenter the profession before 1970 to fill reasonable minimum growth and replacement needs. And the growth in quantity should be fortified by improvement in quality. Colleges, too, face great shortages of instructors.

In the health fields, present shortages of medical and nursing personnel will be seriously aggravated unless the number of persons currently receiving professional education is increased on the order of 50 to 100 percent or more, depending on the particular discipline.

Changes in types of skills needed in nonprofessional occupations are also in prospect. Even in semiskilled and service occupations, rapid changes in job content are commonplace. In the past a particular skill often lasted a man a lifetime; increasingly, knowledge of tools, materials, methods, and other elements of a job has short-lived value unless a worker can update it at frequent intervals. Much of the needed reshaping of skills must come from continued learning during employment, but for many the essential new skills will have to be provided in other ways.

Our education facilities, curriculum, and methods must be revamped to take account of these changes. They must emphasize development of general background and versatility to provide a firm base for a lifetime of continued learning--and adult education and training must be extended more widely to help workers keep pace with evolving skill needs.

ACTION

There is no set of blueprints which carefully prescribes the responsibilities of various public and private groups to meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities of the manpower prospects which have been discussed. Nor is it the wish of our society that there should be. Our overall manpower effort will continue to be the product, essentially, of a great many individual decisions by private citizens, organizations, and institutions. There are, at the same time, certain .parts of the evolving manpower program that require action that we recognize as being necessarily carried out through the agencies of government.

PROGRAMS STARTED IN THE LAST 2 YEARS

Positive steps have been taken in the last a years to create additional job opportunities through greater economic growth. These programs--including liberalized depreciation regulations and the investment credit measure to stimulate investment, the trade expansion legislation, and the stimulus to housing and urban redevelopment in the 1961 housing legislation--have been considered in detail in my economic message earlier this year.

In addition, two pioneering programs have been started to help counteract certain structural aspects of unemployment.

1. Area development assistance for localities of heavy unemployment was inaugurated under the Area Redevelopment Act of 1961. The act makes available to urban and rural areas with high unemployment a range of special Federal assistance: Loans to create new private enterprise and expansion of existing firms in such areas, financial aid for public facility improvements that will increase industrial or commercial employment, and technical aid to help develop new products, markets, and resources, and new uses of old resources. The act also introduced the concept of Federal retraining for unemployed workers, providing for brief training-with subsistence allowances up to 16 weeks while in training--to equip the jobless with new skills required by expanding industries or by identifiable job vacancies in the area. Already, 300 training projects have been initiated, involving about 17,000 workers.

Then, in 1962 the Public Works Acceleration Act authorized $900 million for public works projects in areas with continued substantial unemployment. The $400 million appropriated by the Congress at the end of last October has already been allocated for some 3,800 projects which will generate nearly 630,000 man-months of on-site employment and additional employment in supplier industries. To carry forward the constructive effects of this program, I have requested appropriation of the remaining $500 million authorized by the act.

2. Retraining programs with Federal assistance to prepare workers for unfilled jobs, was launched on a general scale by the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962. This act adds several important innovations to the training structure of the Area Redevelopment Act: Training is not limited to particular areas; training and living allowances are authorized up to 52 weeks; transportation allowances where necessary can be offered trainees; the training needs of workers in low-income farm families, as well as special projects for unemployed youth are specifically authorized.

The Secretary of Labor has reported that, in the first 5 months of the Manpower Act's training provisions, nearly 600 projects involving over 20,000 workers have been initiated, with hundreds more in the advanced planning stage. The numbers in these early efforts are understandably small in relation to total unemployment, but initial experience indicates that such assistance can be most valuable in bringing skills into better balance with manpower requirements--and in bringing new hope, purpose, and opportunity to many unemployed. I have asked the Congress for the funds authorized for the second year of the program to increase the number of unemployed workers to be trained in the next fiscal year.

An additional step was taken in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 for workers (and firms) adversely affected by increased import competition arising from tariff concessions. Workers displaced by such foreign competition are to be provided, in addition to special retraining and income maintenance, relocation assistance if necessary. My budget recommendation has requested funds to implement this worker-adjustment program.

I look to these new training ventures to teach us much about the potential of retraining as a mechanism for keeping the labor force adaptable. I also expect that retraining and skill upgrading will become even more significant as unemployment is reduced. They will make possible increasingly intensive utilization of our manpower resources and will permit more rapid economic growth without danger of inflation.

Under the Manpower Act, we have initiated an intensified research and evaluation program to probe more deeply into the impact of technological change, suitable adjustment practices, and future manpower needs and resources. I look to this expanded research effort to develop new tools of understanding and new approaches to aid in realizing our full manpower potential.

To improve employment services in our rapidly changing labor markets, the U.S. Employment Service was strengthened and given additional funds. It has stepped up counseling and placement activities, enlarged the gathering and dissemination of information on job opportunities and available workers, and is playing a key role in determining local needs for retraining and in placing retrained workers. The result of the strengthening of this Federal-State employment service system is attested to by its record of nearly 7 million job placements in 1962, a postwar high.

To help meet minimum income needs of unemployed and poorly paid workers and to help stimulate aggregate demand, several important income-maintenance measures have been adopted in 1961-62: (a) a temporary program provided extended unemployment compensation to 2.8 million unemployed workers who exhausted their State benefits; (b) improvements in public welfare authorized by new legislation are aiding families on public welfare to become self-supporting, extending Federal aid to dependent children of unemployed parents, and providing financial encouragement for community work and training programs; and (c) minimum wage requirements were raised and extended to protect additional workers.

These measures provided a notable beginning for improvements in our manpower program, but alone they will not suffice to achieve and maintain satisfactory levels of employment.

PROGRAMS THIS YEAR

In order to succeed, a manpower policy requires above all the creation of an adequate number of job opportunities. I have urged the Congress to enact tax changes which will provide enlarged consumer markets and encourage increased investment, thereby setting in motion demand for additional work and workers--which in the spiral of economic progress will generate larger markets, additional investment, and more job opportunities. Tax reduction will provide the single strongest push possible to move the economy toward achievable full employment.

The tax program also includes several proposed changes which are important to the development of a sound labor market policy: Deductions for child care for certain workers would be liberalized; treatment of moving expenses of employees would be broadened, fostering greater mobility; and inequities in tax treatment of older people who continue to work would be corrected.

We must, at the same time that we increase the number of job opportunities, add to the tools needed to combat structural unemployment. Foremost in importance are programs geared to the surge of new entrants to the labor force--today's and tomorrow's young workers. A society concerned about its future cannot be indifferent or neglectful of its youth. Our young people, and the vast numbers of younger children crowding up through the elementary schools, must be prepared for their worklife. And when they are ready to work, job opportunities must be available for them. By 1970 one-third of the work force will have started work in the sixties.

For this purpose, my proposal for a Youth Employment Act is a vital step for stimulating and tapping the potential of unemployed youngsters. It will furnish useful work experience through employment and training opportunities in conservation and local public service activities. Full details of this proposal were presented in my Message on Youth.

We must also expand the quality and availability of education for our future work force, as set forth in my Message on Education last month.

The prime basis for acquisition of skill and effective productive contribution is a sound general education. More than ever it is necessary to be able to read well and calculate correctly in order to absorb concepts and understand applications required for mastery of skills needed for employment. Too many of our workers have reached adulthood without receiving the fundamental elementary and secondary education desirable for maximum performance.

We must modernize and enlarge our vocational and technical education programs for all age groups--and focus them on occupations with future opportunities. Adequate facilities and qualified teachers are disturbingly below need; vigorous expansion is urgent if we want tomorrow's workers to be qualified for tomorrow's needs.

We must encourage additional higher education and graduate study, particularly in the scientific, engineering, teaching, and other professional fields, to develop the high-level talent for the leadership and progress worthy of this Nation. My Message on Health urges enactment of legislation to help combat serious and increasing shortages of trained medical manpower.

My Science Advisory Committee has emphasized the need to increase the number of superior engineers, mathematicians, and physical scientists by increasing the number of high-ranking college graduates who undertake advanced study. This is necessary not only for defense, space, and atomic research and development programs but also for rapid progress in all other branches of technology, to which we look for lower prices of goods and services and for bolstering our international economic position.

Nor can we be satisfied to permit graduation from school to signify an end to formal education. We must make available opportunity for adult education to broaden and refurbish work skills periodically. For adults with limited education, we must make available literacy and basic education so that they will not be condemned to jobs below their potential because of past deficiencies in education opportunity.

Meeting these needs for additional education is necessarily a cooperative private and public responsibility. The State and local governments, employers, unions and other private organizations, along with the Federal Government, must each increase substantially their investment in improving the knowledge and skills of our people.

It will be costly, but other costs will be upon us in even greater amounts and less rewarding form if we fail to move. We must choose whether increased funds will go into more and better education--or will be required for increased costs for unemployment and welfare needs, control of delinquency, and for other penalties inflicted on the individual and the Nation by inadequate preparation for worklife.

To safeguard minimum income of our work force, I am requesting two other significant measures:

The unemployment insurance system should be strengthened to provide more adequate protection on a permanent basis. Benefits should be improved in amount and duration and should be extended to workers still not covered. Unemployment compensation is often the crucial difference between severe economic deprivation and dignified maintenance of necessary living between jobs. It permits staying power to resist sharp downgrading of work--and helps maintain purchasing power in the economy. The improvements being proposed will fortify these and other values.

The Fair Labor Standards Act should be extended to provide minimum wage and related protection for additional groups of workers, particularly those in larger firms in major service industries. The findings of special studies called for by Congress and the beneficial experience from extension in 1961 to several groups, notably in retail trade, testify to the wisdom of such action.

ADDITIONAL PROGRAMS

A variety of additional activities must also be pursued.

We must proceed more vigorously to eliminate discrimination barriers to full use of the work force. Racial, religious, sex, and age discrimination must be eradicated to keep faith with our ideals and to strengthen our resources and speed our growth. The Federal Government is moving energetically to eliminate the last vestiges of discrimination in its own employment policies and to ensure that all who do business with it observe nondiscriminatory employment policies. We hope and expect that, as all citizens come to realize the waste and dangers of discrimination, all our private institutions will act expeditiously to eliminate practices which weaken our economy and which arouse resentment and concern abroad.

We must stimulate broadened willingness to initiate and experiment with new methods of developing and applying manpower potential. Our objective is to overcome obstacles to employment for the unskilled, older workers with obsolete skills, the poorly motivated, the partially disabled--and to construct more effective and more equitable means of meeting worker needs in the face of radical technological change.

We cannot permit obsolescence of a worker's skills to make the worker obsolete as well. Nor can we allow deficiencies in education and social development to mark individuals as permanent discards, as a dead weight for society.

These are challenges to industry and the community for social inventiveness to match our achievements in scientific inventiveness. Rewarding new approaches can be forged if industry and community leaders undertake to apply their knowledge and resources with zeal and dedication.

More must be done to enlist the interest, capacity, and ideas of the academic centers of learning; the national associations of management, professional, labor, church, and other groups; the foundations; and the major corporations--each of which has distinctive talent and experience to contribute uniquely and notably toward improvement of our manpower programs. Increased attention must be centered in the scientific and investment communities on the manpower implications of their activities, so that manpower planning and technology planning may be better blended in purpose and result.

Emphasis on international sharing of knowledge and experience is also necessary. Our country provides technical aid to less developed countries seeking improved manpower development, but we can benefit also from an increased flow of information from abroad. Some nations have developed within a democratic framework skillful labor market programs offering many helpful ideas.

The Department of Labor will be expanding its information and communication activities relating to manpower in order to disseminate more widely the fruits of increased research and experimentation.

Steps are being taken by the Department of Labor to strengthen and better organize its facilities to provide special assistance, when requested, to management and labor in industries confronted with problems of marked change and sizable manpower adjustments. This program will aid collective bargaining by working with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and the National Mediation Board to strengthen their preventive mediation efforts. It will proceed in advance of emergencies or collective bargaining deadlines to gather and supply facts and information relating to anticipated changes and to help the parties develop equitable programs for meeting the problems. This new effort will draw upon existing government facilities and pool information from private programs and sources, in seeking to reduce labor-management difficulties through advance preparation and action.

The primary focus of this initial manpower report has been on the levels of employment and unemployment, on mechanisms for improved labor market behavior, and on skill development. Attention and study are also required on other basic issues on which there has been little conscious national effort.

Public and private welfare, education, health, research, cultural, defense, and other major policies have significant and perhaps conflicting implications for our Nation's manpower future. They should be appraised in an overall framework from the standpoint of their long-range manpower effects to point directions for more rational coordination and meshing.

Worker selection of occupations is now often haphazard or influenced by incentives unrelated to the best interests of the individuals or of the Nation. The factors shaping career development of youngsters and changes in occupations by adults should be assessed as a basis for an improved guidance program for improved career planning.

Strengthened research efforts are necessary to provide more adequate current dam, and projections, on requirements and resources by occupation and skill level so that planning of training efforts and educational programs, and vocational guidance activities may be correctly geared to present and future manpower needs.

The effects of different kinds of work in providing personal satisfaction, and the encouragement of attitudes that bring about such satisfaction deserve increased attention, as do the cultural challenges presented by the increasing amount of leisure time available to most workers. Some thought might well be given to the changing patterns of toil in which persons in the upper levels of large organizations--be they private corporations, trade unions, universities, or government departments--would appear to be working longer and longer hours, while the general run of employees enjoy ever more reasonable schedules.

We have considerable insight into factors impeding or stimulating occupational, industrial, and geographical mobility. We need updating of such research in the light of rapid technological and other change, together with exploration of the degree and nature of mobility desirable for flexible yet stable economic and manpower development, and study of the means of overcoming obstacles to desirable mobility.

CONCLUSION

Greater employment opportunities, and a work force ever more capable of making use of such opportunities--these are among the foremost domestic needs of the Nation. We must meet them. Ours is a rich nation, but not inexhaustibly so. There are 32 million Americans who are still on the fringes of poverty, and worse. A nation can waste its resources as surely as an individual can. Without measure, the greatest waste we experience today is that of unemployment.

Pressures are mounting as witnessed by calls for artificial cutbacks in the workweek and by resistance to change based on fear that technological progress threatens worker security. Such pressures cannot be resolved by words. The problems creating the pressures must be met by effective and constructive action to accelerate economic expansion and full use of our manpower capability.

The Nation has begun such a program. Additional steps on a wide front are needed this year to carry it forward. There is no easy solution in sight. But with dedicated application of our national will, ingenuity, and compassion, we shall meet this manpower challenge--proceed to full employment, improved standards of work and life for minority groups, adequate preparation for future manpower needs, widespread technological advance--thereby raising our levels of well-being at home and strengthening the security of the Nation abroad.

JOHN F. KENNEDY