vided assistance to over 1,850 development groups, with local office personnel being either members of or regular consultants to 850 different groups. Services provided to employment development groups included current labor supply and demand information; specific or general data on skills of the work force for particular inquiries or overall promotional brochures; assistance in planning, setting up, or selecting trainees for vocational training programs; suggestions on organizing and conducting various phases of employment development campaigns; and recruiting for and staffing of new plants.

Mounting concern about the problem of localized unemployment in areas of substantial and persistent labor surplus resulted in the formation by the President of the Interdepartmental Committee to Goordinate Federal Urban Area Assistance Programs. Its purpose is to focus established governmental activities and resources, including technical assistance and loan and procurement funds, on these problem areas to the maximum possible extent. Bureau staff participated actively with this committee, visiting a number of labor surplus areas to review local development programs and to explain the kinds of Federal assistance that can strengthen local efforts.

Areas especially in need of employment services, including employment development assistance, are the rural low-income areas which are characterized by subsistence farms and high underemployment. The employment service continued to seek ways in which to increase the effectiveness of its services to rural people faced by lack of local nonagricultural jobs and remoteness from urban employment centers.

Local operations were largely completed on the four pilot projects of the experimental rural area program which had been initiated the previous year to explore the problems of (1) providing basic employment services to rural low-income areas, and (2) assisting such areas to develop programs of economic self-improvement. The pilot projects were run in one area each in Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. A sample household survey was conducted to develop data on population, labor force, and income.

Temporary local offices registered, tested, and interviewed unemployed and underemployed area residents to determine their current skills and occupational potential. Following the inventory of jobseekers, individuals were counseled and referred to job openings as circumstances permitted. State and local groups were helped to prepare economic base studies of their areas, which included the manpower data developed by the employment service.

At the close of the fiscal year 1960, a work committee of State employment security agency participants in the program met in Washington to evaluate the immediate results of the pilot projects. The direct applicant services of counseling and local and clearance placement, although not emphasized in operations, were found by the work committee to be badly needed. The State agency personnel reported that their community employment development services had sparked great enthusiasm for local economic expansion. Manpower potential information developed through the projects had proved useful both in analysis of the capabilities of the work force and promotion of the area for industrial development. Two

of the areas had already attracted new plants. The work committee concluded that experience gained during fiscal year 1960 has laid the groundwork for providing more effective employment services in rural low-income areas in the future.

Farm Labor Service

The dual responsibility of the Bureau's Farm Labor Service is to the farm employer and the farm worker. The Service seeks to assure, insofar as possible, that growers will have access through the public employment service to adequate and qualified labor throughout the productive season, and that all farm labor will have full work opportunities.

Established farm placement services operate in the State employment security agencies and aid in balancing demand and supply of the farm labor force by recruiting and placing farm workers. They also study and seek to solve specific problems arising from the complex needs of agricultural labor demands.

The scope of the Service's work includes placing year-round farm workers, recruiting seasonal workers, making determinations of farm labor requirements and channeling farm workers to areas of threatened labor shortage, providing applicable wage determinations, and guiding growers in observing the provisions of Mexican and other foreign farm labor agreements. It also encourages farmjobs-for-youth programs, implements the amended recruitment regulations of the Secretary in regard to domestic migratory labor, and directs grain- and cottonharvesting equipment and operators to areas of need through its established interstate facilities.

To understand the placement problems of the Service, one must recognize the changing nature of the farm labor force. Total farm population has dropped to a new low, now less than 12 percent of the population of the United States. Larger but fewer farms have emerged. The long-term downtrend in farm employment has continued during fiscal 1960.

Not only is farm labor dwindling but the increasing specialization of farms, the mechanization of some functions of crop production, and the purchase of more and more farm production materials from off-farm sources have tended to concentrate labor requirements into shorter peak seasons each year. “Agribusiness" (i.e., food processing and packaging, and the manufacture of mechanical planters, harvesters, chemical cultivators, pesticides, and fertilizers) has caused displacement and/or draining of workers from the actual farm labor force. All of these factors have called for a new gauge to determine demand and availability of supply. New appraisals are used in planning the direction of migrant labor toward locations and where and when it is most needed.

Besides these new problems of a dislocated and diminishing labor force, the vagaries of nature often harass farm placement activities. A late, cold, or suddenly premature season may cause severe displacements in labor demand or supply. Workers arrive, find harvests late, and leave; when the harvest is ready there is no one to bring it in. A freeze late in the growing season may ruin

crops and strand hundreds of migrant workers, as happened in Florida early this year. The State employment agency there went into emergency action to locate other jobs and temporary welfare relief for the workers. The cold, wet, late growing season which followed the unexpected freeze throughout most of the United States disrupted normal labor supply, and State employment agencies encountered many additional problems and crises in having labor crews on hand when needed.

Other developments of fiscal 1960 underlined emergent trends in farm labor. According to figures of the Department of Labor and the Bureau of the Census, the total monthly farm employment in fiscal year 1960 averaged 5,653,000, compared with the previous year's 5,881,000. The decrease was among farm operators and unpaid members of their families. Hired farm worker employment remained fairly stable both this year and last, at 1,711,000.

Employment of seasonal workers fluctuated from 309,000 in March to a peak of 1,482,000 in September in 267 agricultural areas reporting to the Bureau. An increase of more than 100,000 this year in peak seasonal employment mainly reflected the larger cotton harvest and its higher yield per acre. The end of the cotton acreage reserve program, and the newly authorized optional increases in cotton allotments, put 3.2 million additional acres into production in fiscal year 1960.

Technological advances in the form of better seed, preemergent herbicides, flame cultivation for weed control, and mechanization of planting, cultivating, and harvesting processes continued to alter patterns of labor use. The impact on the labor force of the mechanical harvesting of snapbeans, cotton, tree fruit, peas, and potatoes has been reported in many areas. The use of vegetable harvest equipment that combines harvesting and field packing and the development of a cotton combine that picks, strips, gins, cleans, and compresses cotton into 500-pound bales as it moves down the field are significant.

Program Emphasis

Public hearings were held in September following the issuance of the U.S. Attorney General's opinion upholding the right of the Secretary to issue regulations concerning migrant labor under the Wagner-Peyser Act, and after the publication of the proposed amendments to the regulations in the Federal Register.

The testimony of more than 30 organizations and 70 individuals was analyzed. On November 20, 1959, the amended regulations were published in final form in the Federal Register with notice that they would be effective in 30 days.

The Secretary's release of November 20, 1959, on amending title 20 of the Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933, as amended, chapter V, part 602, 20 CFR, stated: "The purpose of these amendments is to make certain, before interstate recruitment of domestic agricultural workers by the United States Employment Service, that the wages, housing and facilities, provisions for transportation, and other terms and conditions of employment accord to prevailing standards of employ

ment."

Training meetings instituted in the various State employment agencies prepared staffs for implementation of the new regulations. New "Employment Security Manual" instructions were provided with the regulations, and continuing emphasis is being placed on their observance.

A separate and important facet of program emphasis concerned the need to improve the selection of workers for referral.

Advisory Committees

Private and official groups representing the interests of farm employers and farm workers are concentrated in a number of advisory committees. Meetings on farm problems were held throughout the year by the Farm Committee of the Interstate Conference of Employment Security Agencies; the Special Farm Labor Committee and its subcommittees on domestic farm labor and Mexican labor; the Labor Advisory Committee, whose members are from organized labor; and the four-State Work Committee of the Rural Development Committee. The Secretary of Labor appointed in 1959 four consultants from outside the Government to advise him on problems arising out of Public Law 78. The consultants recommended that although the law should be extended on a temporary basis, it should provide for increased authority to prevent adverse effect on wages and working conditions of domestic farm workers.

Further recommendations were that the law should (1) confine the use of Mexican workers to necessary crops during temporary labor shortages, and to unskilled nonmachine jobs; (2) authorize the Secretary of Labor to take such action as would reduce reliance on Mexican labor and increase primary responsibility of farm employers for recruitment of domestic farm workers; (3) direct the establishment of specific criteria for judging "adverse effect"; and (4) authorize the Secretary to establish wages for Mexican workers at no less than the prevailing domestic farm rate in the area.

Recruitment of Local Labor

Agricultural placements during fiscal year 1960 totaled 9,747,116. More than 800,000 of these were of year-round and seasonal workers with special skills, many of whom live on the farm where they work. They were recruited, in a number of instances, through "farm employment days."

Well-publicized farm employment days provide an occasion for farm employers and workers to meet and negotiate work agreements. During calendar year 1959, 79 local offices had 1,169 farm employment days which gave employers and workers, and frequently their wives, an opportunity for joint employment interviews.

A method of recruitment used in areas where labor demands are too limited to support a permanent farm placement office is through volunteer farm placement representatives, men generally well known in their small communities who serve without remuneration. They work under the direction of the public

employment officer serving the area, and effectively aid employers and farm workers to meet for job negotiations. In 26 States, more than 3,000 volunteer farm placement representatives made a total of 100,900 placements in fiscal year 1960.

The "day haul" program was instituted to transport workers daily from population centers to farming areas. The "established day haul" (one where workers are assigned to employers for daily work for a definite period) in calendar year 1959 drew peak day employment of 154,000 workers from 1,329 towns. "Supervised day haul" (one where work crews are allocated to employers on a daily basis for transporting to the fields) provided a peak day employment of 170,158 from 820 towns.

Recruitment of youth for farm jobs under special programs totaled about 19,000 during the year. Primarily employed during vacation, these youngsters went on day hauls or lived in camps or on approved farms.

Domestic Migrant Farm Labor

When there are not enough local workers in a community, many farm employers depend on migrant workers either from within the State or from other States.

Job orders involving more workers than are available within the State are placed in interstate clearance, a service which recruits needed workers in other States. When this is done, the annual worker plan (AWP) generally comes into use. The plan is designed to make possible the placement of migrant crews, families, and individual workers in a series of jobs, or otherwise develop a continuity of employment. It is operated through local, State, and regional farm labor offices which cooperate in making up work schedules and job itineraries in their individual work areas. After they provide this information according to crop and season to other States and regions, dates of labor demand and labor availability are reconciled and a transfer or referral of adequate labor is supplied to the growers, which at the same time affords more continuous employment to migrants.

Early in the season, itineraries are made in Florida to schedule workers in a series of jobs as far away as New York State and New England. Workers are scheduled in Texas to labor in almost continuous cultivating and harvesting jobs through the Midwest and the Great Lakes States. Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico also prepare work schedules for farm labor going up through the Pacific Northwest.

In 1959, the AWP served a total of 167,500 persons from 34 States; about 68,000 came from Florida, and some 56,000 came from Texas. The total number of interstate migrant work crews and family groups was 6,852. The number of farm work openings filled through interstate clearance procedures in 1959, including both annual worker plan and individual placements, was 183,500. In August 1959, domestic migrant workers, including interstate, intrastate, and Puerto Rican, reached an employment peak of 313,000 in areas reporting to the Bureau.