Development and use of labor market facts.. Improved information for economic analysis. Special activities... Management improvement.. Page 113 113 116 118 119 119 121 123 126 128 Administrative financing operations. Defense readiness and manpower mobilization. International labor activities. Appendix tables 1. Selected employment service activities, U.S. totals for fiscal 2. Significant provisions in State unemployment insurance laws. 4. Subject employers, covered employment, and selected unem- 6. Selected data on unemployment compensation for ex-service- 7. Disqualifications under State programs, by issue, U.S. totals 1332 134 136 138 139 140 142 Introduction As an economic decline left old problems clearly exposed and created new ones, fiscal 1961 was a year of reappraisal and change for the Bureau in its efforts to help attain the Department's goal of employment security for American workers. The President's economic message in February outlined the approach: long-range, carefully conceived measures for permanent improvement. Experts from education and industry, labor and civic groups, and representatives from State agencies advised on plans and helped the Bureau adopt new perspectives. First to receive careful thought was the employment service, which, with the unemployment insurance program, operates through 54 State employment security agencies linked with each other and the Federal Government through the Labor Department's Bureau of Employment Security. In the employment services' counseling, testing, and job placement and in its concern for community development and special often-jobless groups, there is a means of generating improved economic health. But increasing workloads during a recession year had strained staff resources already inadequate to cover the range of employment security concerns. Additional congressional appropriations enabled the Bureau to establish task forces to review programs in seven areas ranging from automation to older workers and youth. With the new funds, the Bureau also turned immediately to improving service in the 52 largest metropolitan areas, which contain over one-half of the Nation's nonagricultural employment and have the most acute need for employment services. Augmented staffs within the Bureau and States and throughout the 1,800 local public employment offices helped to turn plans into reality. A new task for the employment security system will be special manpower duties under the Area Redevelopment Act of 1961. After the industrial needs of an area of chronic unemployment are determined by the Department of Labor, the employment service specialists will counsel and refer individuals with outmoded skills for training and retraining. The farm labor service concentrated its appraisal in regional and local offices, particularly in such areas as application of the standards for decent housing for farm workers and compliance with Public Law 78 and the Migratory Labor Agreement, both regulating foreign farm labor. The farm labor service also continued its programs on behalf of migrant workers, especially efforts to improve their living and working conditions. A year in which $3.7 billion (compared with $2.5 billion in 1960) was paid in unemployment insurance benefits impelled new thinking about the program. Payment of benefits during retraining and the place of unemployment insurance in revitalizing depressed areas were considerations for the future. As an immediate offset to economic decline, however, the Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation Act went into effect, paying $1.4 billion by June 30 to workers who had exhausted their benefits under regular State programs. The Bureau followed its progress with careful studies of the characteristics of the exhaustees, a survey calling forth the most massive technical planning and administration of any unemployment insurance research project in the history of the program. The Bureau also concentrated on better staff recruitment, selection, and training on every level during the fiscal year. Outservice training, special meetings, new educational techniques, and training units on expanded programs were some Bureau methods in this area. Helping to put the improved employment security system on the soundest financial basis are the newly adopted budgetary management standards for State agencies. They provide a better way of calculating the added cost of increased claims workloads, more detailed advanced planning with which to compare actual performances, and a modified system of annual budget preparation. Established programs also went forward as the employment service made 5,591,089 nonfarm placements and added 10 new urban placement centers to the professional office network. The unemployment insurance program registered a 23 percent increase in the filing of interstate claims, which indicated some measure of success in furthering labor mobility. The farm labor service's regular workload in connection with the Migrant Labor Agreement and contracts with foreign workers was augmented by approximately 100 labor disputes involving employers of Mexicans in California agriculture. The disputes centered about employer breaches of migrant labor contracts. The Bureau fought injunctions preventing its action in employer ineligibility and labor dispute situations. The fieldwork for a revised “Dictionary of Occupational Titles" neared completion as 8,586 job descriptions were verified and 2,427 new definitions written. The Dictionary's aim is to provide a complete guide to the occupational structure of the United States, listing and explaining the various jobs in every industry. The Bureau completed and issued the "Defense Readiness Handbook," a guide for State agencies in developing plans for their local offices in a nuclear attack. This was the Department's response to its planning responsibility for civilian manpower in an emergency. Full Cycle Fiscal year 1961 witnessed the fourth in a postwar series of short cyclical economic swings. During the year, the economy ran virtually full cycle. Gross national product (GNP) and industrial production-two leading measures of the Nation's economic growth-began to decline in mid-1960, dropped to a low in the first quarter of calendar 1961, and recovered sharply during the second quarter to recoup or even surpass all the losses sustained earlier. Gross national product reached an annual rate of $516 billion at the close of the fiscal year, as compared with $501 billion only a quarter earlier, and $506 billion in the corresponding quarter of the previous year. Industrial production ended the fiscal year at virtually the same level as it began, and by June 1961 was 110 percent of the 1957 average. Personal income in June 1961 reached an alltime high of $417 billion (seasonally adjusted), $12 billion above the corresponding month of 1960. Although total employment hit a record level of 68.7 million, the seasonally adjusted rate of unemployment, at 6.8 percent, had not yet responded to the general improvement. Automation and Technological Change During the past decade, recurring economic recessions have been concentrated in the hard goods industries where automation and technological change have been taking place rapidly. This has left large numbers of workers, frequently with high but now obsolete skills, confronted with long-term unemployment. While new technology contributes to the continued growth of productivity underlying our high standard of living, it creates social and economic problems, such as labor displacement and obsolescence of skills, which take time to resolve. For this reason, and because of deep public interest in the progress of technological change, the Bureau is concerned with the problems of adjustment to such changes. New automatic equipment and processes, and other technological changes, are believed to have a pronounced effect on the levels of employment and unemployment. The extent of this effect is difficult to measure precisely, because changes in the level of employment caused by automation are entangled with those created by changing consumer tastes, fluctuations in the business cycle, development of substituted materials, foreign competition, shifts in population, and many other factors. Occupational Trends If the precise measurement of automation's impact on the work force is not available, the implication of extensive improvements in technology for the Nation's occupational structure is nevertheless clear. Existing jobs are undergoing significant modification in many industries, while new opportunities are being created in various fields such as electronic data processing, atomic development, and space exploration. |