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STATEMENT BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE URBAN COALITION ON PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYMENT The Urban Coalition Executive Committee calls upon the Congress to enact urgently needed emergency legislation to provide at least one million jobs through public service employment. In support of this objective, The Urban Coalition's Statement of Principles, Goals, and Commitments, endorsed in August, 1967 by 1,000 representatives of business, labor, religion, civil rights, and local government, calls for action consistent with the following principles: --The federal government must enlist the cooperation of government at all levels and of private industry to assure that meaningful, productive work is available to everyone willing and able to work. -~To create socially useful jobs, the emergency work program should concentrate on tpe huge backlog of employment needs in parks, streets, slums, countryside, schools, colleges, libraries, and hospitals . To this end, an emergency work program should be initiated and should have as its first goal putting at least one million of the presently unemployed into productive work at the earliest possible moment . --The program must provide meaningful jobs--not dead-end, make work projects--so that the employment e x per ience gained adds to the capabilities and broadens the opportunities of the employees to become pr oductive members of the permanent wo rk force o f our nation. --Basic education , training, and counseling must be an integral part of the program to assure extended opportunities for upward job mobility and to improve employee �STATEMENT March 14, 1968 Page 2 productivity. Funds for training, education, and counseling should be made available to private industry as well as to public and private nonprofit agencies. --Funds for employment should be made available to local and state governments, nonprofit institutions, and federal agencies able to demonstrate their ability to use · labor productively without reducing existing levels of employment or undercutting existing labor standards or wages which prevail for comparable work or services in the area but are not less than the federal minimum wage. --Such a program should seek to qualify new employees to become part of the regular work force and to meet normal performance standards. --The operation of the program should be keyed to specific, localized unemployment problems and focused initially on those areas where the need is most apparent. The Clark-Javits Emergency Employment Act proposed in the last session of Congress was responsive to these principles and was endorsed by The Urban Coalition. It is now even mor e urgent for the Congress to respond to the conditions of unemployment despair revea l ed in hearings held by the Senate Sub-Committee on Unemployment. The pr inciples endo rsed by The Urban Coalition are consistent with the findings and recommendations o f the National Committee on Technology Automation and Economic Progress (Feb. 1966), the White Hous e Conference to Fulfill These Rights (June, 1966), and The National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber (July, 1967). The Re port of the President's Commission on Civil Disorders leaves no doubt as to the nation's responsibilities . �