The Other America

From ARNOLD BEICHMAN

NEW YORK

MEN of noble ideals comprised La Comite de l'Extinction de la Mendicite established during the French Revolution by the Constitutent Assembly. They enunciated, for example, an amazing doctrine for the eighteenth century— that society owed every man his subsistence, 'et cette secourable assistance ne doit pas etre re- gard& comme un bienfait: The commission worked hard, investigated, set up ateliers publics to provide jobs, all this with the ultimate aim of eliminating poverty. Their minutes and reports during 1790-91 make fascinating reading, par- ticularly this sad conclusion: 'Poverty is a malady inherent in all great societies; a good Constitution, a wise administration can diminish its intensity but nothing, unhappily, can radically destroy it; so many causes combine irresistibly to keep it alive.' (Or as President Lyndon B. John- son, a century and three-quarters later, said in his Budget message: 'Poverty stems from no one source, but reflects a multitude of causes.') 'Poverty' now has taken an honoured bud- getary seat alongside foreign aid, space, defence. Only Senator Goldwater, doggedly swimming up- stream like a salmon at spawning time, has dared suggest publicly that the poor and jobless deserve little of our largesse, since they are either of low intelligence or ambition.' The Senator's friends have been busy explaining since that he was just being realistic, not hard-hearted.

One marvels at all this brouhaha about what should be a not too insoluble problem for rich America, still riding high after thirty-five sue- cessive months of golden economic expansion. Three decades ago, President Roosevelt could talk about a nation with one-third of its people 'ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed.' Today it is one- fifth, an improvement of 40 per cent, though far from a desirable consummation. As for un- employment, it shouldn't call for exorcism to find jobs for four or five million Americans when countries like Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Sweden and even Italy seem to be managing. After all, this isn't the Depression when 25 per cent of the work force was jobless.

Until a year or two ago, the word and con- cept of 'poverty' was unheard in the American conversation-pit. Michael Harrington wrote a book called The Other America, in which he said: The poor have a worse relative position in American society today than they did a decade and a half ago.' But nobody paid much attention to him or to his subject, for, as he wrote, 'The poor are politically invisible; they have no face; they have no voice.' Today 'poverty' is a fashionable cri de cceur and the Saturday Evening Post recently ran a six-page report with superb photographs about 'the invisible Americans.' Henry Mayhew would certainly have felt at home in America this winter.

The suddenness with which America has be- come painfully conscious of its own Two Nations and the wide national consensusthat 'something must be done' has raised the deepest doubts that the deed will in any way equal the sincerity and rhetoric of the crusade. James Reston recently wrote in the New York Times: In •this situation, the President has cut the budget and declared war on poverty and pleased both the conservatives and the liberals without telling either,of them how he proposes td do it. Yet everybody agrees this is good politics.

Mr_.g,esion...mity be .a hit unfair to....a...new

President who, after all, is dealing with a de- plorably bad Congress, perhaps the worst we have had since President Truman's `do nothing' eightieth Congress.

I do not minimise the seriousness of our un- employment and poverty problem. Indeed, there is every reason to worry about our inability to do anything about it. Despite six peaks set by the US economy • last year, the unemployment figure refuses to budge. During the 1954 reces- sion year, unemployment averaged 5.6 per cent of the civilian work force. In 1963, a year of prosperity, the percentage was 5.7. Equally dis- turbing is the fact that unemployment keeps rising during the recovery period after each re- cession—from 3.1 per cent in the 1951-53 recovery to 5.6 in the 1962-63 recovery.

It has not yet become wholly cleat to American opinion that the economy has so changed that 'war against poverty' slogans will accomplish any more than the legislative piety expressed by the Full Employment Act of 1946 has done, except, of course, to imbue the sloganeers with a fiery feeling in their bellies. American society has been so transformed by the new technology and demographic trends that, under present con- ditions, the private sector of the economy is no longer capable of providing jobs for our bur- geoning work force. The tremendous increase in productivity or output per man-hour over the last four years simply means that increased con- sumer demand—say, the result of the proposed tax cut—could be satisfied with little if any 'in- ctease in payrolls.

Unless the most drastic measures are under- taken, there is every reason to predict that we shall have 11 per cent unemployment by 1970. A continuing increase in productivity and no vast increase in demand must mean mass unem- ployment. Between now and 1970, the economy must somehow produce 25,000.000 new jobs to:

1. Keep up with the growth of the labour force from 72,000,000 to 84,000,000.

2. Offset the loss of at least 2,000,000 jobs annually due to technological advance.

Between 1947 and 1957, private industry was generating about 700,000 jobs annually. Since then, it has been producing about 200,000 jobs. This simply means that youngsters between four- teen and twenty-four years of age, Negroes and older workers are part of a growing human slag- heap, for they represent the bulk of the more than 4,000,000 unemployed. The unskilled job which used to take up the slack is disappearing, because, as Secretary Wirtz put it rather cogently : The machines now have, in general, a high- school education in the sense that they can do most jobs that a high-school education qualifies people to do. So machines will get the un- skilled job, because they work for less than living wages.

It cannot be stated often enough that America today is a white-collar country; the blue collar is vanishing. In 1930, the labourer was 20 per cent of the work force; today he is 7 per cent. Or examine this table:

Percentage of Work Force

1947 1962

Workers in goods-producing industries 51% 42% Workers in service industries .. .. 49% 58%

Where, then,....can jobs..come irozo...-if private enterprise cannot produce them? Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia, a long-time student of American manpower problems, has concluded that only government—local, State and Federal— and the non-profit service institutions (colleges, schools, hospitals, etc.) can supply needed em- ployment in the years ahead. Between 1950 and 1960, seven out of eight new jobs added to the economy were generated outside the profit sec- tor. Professor Ginzberg believes that our hope lies in expanding expenditures on education, health, urban renewal, suburban transportation. This expansion is only possible by accelerating capital investment in the non-profit sector. And yet it is precisely these services industries which are the victims of traditional prejudices about 'Big Government' and 'government spending' and which are the political battleground between Republicans and Democrats, between rural and urban lobbies. Being non-profit organisations, these institutions cannot go into the money marts to raise capital.

As a people we have learned to accept without clamorous protest enormous expenditures on public welfare and relief for the unemployed or unemployable. On a cash basis, relief is cheaper than public works programmes. In New York City for the coming fiscal year, the Welfare Department will need $424 million to provide public relief, marginal at best, for a monthly average of 440,000 men, women and children who can qualify. City Welfare Com- missioner Dumpson estimated that at least 1,000,000 New Yorkers—almost 13 per cent of the city's population—are poverty-stricken, meaning a family with less than $2,000 a year or an un- attached individual with less than $1,500 a year.

How much is spent nationally on relief is sub- ject to varying estimates, but it is known that about 7,000,000 Americans are on relief, which means straight monetary grants and/or surplus food allotments. This is accepted because anything else would cost more money in the short run. The US Labour Department has esti- mated that it costs $10,000 to provide one job on public works construction—or $1 billion to create 100,000 jobs. In the private sector, the cost of producing jobs is even higher. Govern- ment statisticians say that to produce one new industrial job in 1955 cost $17,595; in 1959 the cost was $19,409 and in 1962 $22,679. The current cost, according to the AFL-CIO, is even higher—$30,000 to create one new industrial job.

The revelation most shocking to the national conscience has been not merely the extent of poverty, but the extent of illiteracy in the land. The American fantasy is young Abe Lincoln walking four miles a day to school, doing sums on a slate, reading the Bible in a one-room schoolhouse and becoming President. It's dis- concerting to hear that, according to Daniel Bell, there are 8,000,000 'functional illiterates' (less than four years of schooling) in America. Or, according to Acting Labour Commissioner James McFadden of New York City, that there are 254,000 residents, aged twenty-five years or over, without a single year of formal schooling— meaning, of course, they migrated from Puerto Rico or other parts of the mainland. In all, there are half a million adults in New York City with less than five years of formal schooling. The relationship between poverty and education is to be noted in the Council's report that the heads of more than 60 per cent of all poor families in. America have received only a grade-school education.

The American trade union movement is not Ludd i te-minded,-so i4-4%e- accepted - t4te-principle

of attrition as part of collective bargaining. A worker stays on, needed or not, at the same wage and with full benefits, but if he resigns, retires or dies, his job disappears. This is known as 'silent firing.' The Federal Government has now adopted attrition as a policy. As vacancies occur in the Defence Department, the Post Offices and other Federal agencies, they will simply not be filled. Programmatically, the AFL-CIO is press- ing for a $20 billion school construction pro- gramme, a compulsory school-leaving age of eighteen instead of (as it is in many States) seven- teen years of age, medical care for the aged, expansion of low-cost housing, higher wage in- creases than in the past and a $2 an hour mini- mum wage from the present $1.25. It is also pressing for a thirty-five-hour work week and a ban on overtime or, rather, increasing it from the present time-and-a-half penalty rate to double time. There is little likelihood that any of these proposals will pass this Congress.

The most controversial proposal is the shorter work week, which the Administration opposes, but which, in the view of some economists, could increase employment. The opposition to re- duction in hours is not as much against the shorter work week as it is against maintenance of the same weekly wage. After all, 4,000,000 Americans are on a 'no work' week. A cut in the work week from forty to thirty-five hours would mean—at the same take-home pay—a 14.3 per cent increase; from forty to thirty hours, a 25 per cent increase. The shorter work week exists, but the principle of maintaining the same pay does not. Out of a net increase in jobs of 5,800,000 between 1953-62, 3,400,000 were part- time. Labour Department figures show that man- hours worked in the total private economy during 1962 were slightly more than they were during 1953 (keeping in mind the increase in the work force), not because there had been any signifi- cant decline in the standard forty-hour work week, but because net employment in private industry increased only slightly and most of that increase was in part-time work and short week schedules.

Perhaps the most significant harbinger of the drift of informed opinion is a recent statement before a Congressional committee made by Thomas J. Watson, Jnr., head of international Business Machines, certainly the largest cor- poration in the field of computer technology. Mr. Watson, by definition, may not be regarded as an avant-garde liberal. He would know better than anybody, however, what his IBM laboratory chaps are cooking up for all our futures.

Mr. Watson prophesied that 'working hours will eventually be reduced [because] if the un- employment problem does not respond to correc- tive action, it may become necessary to look at the total man-hours worked per year.' He con- tinued: 'Already we see a trend towards longer vacations, sabbaticals and more favourable bene- fits to encourage early retirement. In addition, we must be willing to consider shortening the , work week.'

Mr. Watson uttered a caveat about proceeding 'slowly and with caution,' but he made it quite clear where his heart lay. I suspect that being an intelligent man with inside information, Mr. Watson has seen a couple of machines in the IBM backroom which, when they and their progeny are wedded to industry, may make a ten-hour week seem a sober necessity to keep America the Land of Beulah.

Right now, however, I wonder why Chan- cellor Erhard doesn't recruit redundant American workers instead of Turks and Greeks? After all, what are allies for?