“People in Action: Nothing Changing Unless”
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: April 28, 1962
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Published Article
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Details
In the following article, drafted prior to Kennedy’s 15 March 1962 signing of the Manpower Development and Training bill, King implores the administration to strengthen the multi-million dollar plan, calling it a “drop-in-the-bucket” for its failure to address the more than 4.5 million unemployed workers.1 For African American workers, King said, the bill is a “clear case of too little, too late,” as automation threatens to render the worker obsolete. King insists that the bill must give African Americans the “rightful opportunity to participate in the nation’s job market without restriction and discrimination.” In conclusion, King admonishes the government, saying: “To deny any group honest work and fair play is not only immoral, it is almost murderous. It is deliberate strangulation of physical and cultural development.” The article was published in the New York Amsterdam News.
Negroes, traditionally the “last to be hired, and the first to be fired,” may find themselves in an even more precarious position in the years to come, unless they pressure the administration to put sharp teeth in the new $435 million job training bill.
This manpower training bill is judged to be enough to train a “drop-in-the-bucket” million persons. In addition to unemployed workers, other eligibles for training include members of farm families with a total income of less than $1,200 a year and youths between 16 and 22.
Training allowances will be paid to trainees, equal to the unemployment compensation in the trainee’s state, for a maximum of 52 weeks. Youths between 16 and 19 will get no training allowance and those between 19 and 22 will get $20 a week.
However successful this program becomes, it is a clear case of too little, too late.
The mass of Negroes in the United States are already suffering from the results of long exclusion from trades and job categories in which they could have acquired training and experience.
Now, even while this belated attempt is being made to salvage a segment of the unemployed and potentially employable, “computers and automation threaten to create vast unemployment and social unrest.”
Job Study
A recent job study predicted that the advent of mass automation “would eliminate entire job categories ranging from factory workers to bank tellers and middle-management executives.”2
The Study foresaw a severe displacement of blue collar workers, especially in dock, factory and mine operations, “where Negroes have hitherto found their steadiest employment.”3 An unhealthy effect of automation, it added, may be the lack of jobs for “untrained adolescents,” 26,000,000 of whom will be seeking work in this decade.4
Recently, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, pointed out that as United States population increases and introduction of automatic machinery displace workers on land and in offices and factories, between one million and 1.5 million new jobs have to be found every year … and this at a time when there are already 4.5 million unemployed.5
The nation’s manpower shortage in certain areas and excessive unemployment can be compensated immeasurably, if the administration sees to it that Negroes get their fair share of benefits under the first main provision of the new manpower bill.
That first provision authorizes the Secretary of Labor to make a survey of the nation’s manpower, the skills needed, and then to set up the training programs in those skills found to be in short supply.
U.S. Would Benefit
Affording just one million of the nation’s Negro unemployed and untrained their just opportunity to acquire this much needed job training, would benefit not only the Negro population, but the economy of the entire nation.
Secretary Goldberg made a case for the administration by saying that there is no practical way of providing jobs or security for the United States unles it finds new markets at home and abroad.6 Mr. Goldberg and the administration can take part, they need only to put down their buckets where they are.
They need only to provide the Negroes of the United States with their rightful opportunity to participate in the nation’s job market without restriction and discrimination, and allow the United States to benefit from the increased spending power which will then be afforded these Negroes.
Moral Confusion
The nation’s failure to grapple forthrightly with this problem of economic injustice can lead only to a darker night of moral confusion. We need not look very far to see the injurious effect that discrimination has upon the psychological and moral life of its victims. To deny any group honest work and fair play is not only immoral, it is almost murderous. It is deliberate strangulation of physical and cultural development.7
Few practices are more detrimental to our national welfare than the discrimination with which the economic order is rife. Few practices are more thoroughly sinful.
1. The “Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962” authorized a new three-year program to retrain unemployed workers displaced by automation. To qualify, trainees must be either unemployed youths, the head of a family or household that has been unemployed at least three years, or from a farm family with net income of less than $1,200 a year.
2. See quote in “Automation Report Sees Vast Job Loss,” New York Times, 29 January 1962. King refers to Donald N. Michael’s study Cybernation: The Silent Conquest, which focused on the difficulties brought about by automation (Michael, Cybernation: The Silent Conquest [Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962], p. 10). Automation, according to Michael, makes blue-collar workers and middle management obsolete, while skilled workers are overworked, and too many adolescents are untrained to take on the skilled jobs. Michael proposed shorter hours for the same pay and an expanded public works program as alternate solutions to these problems, noting that “retraining has not always been successful, nor have new jobs based on that retraining been available” (p. 24).
3. In Michael’s study, he argues that one and a half million manufacturing jobs had been cut in the last six years, which impacted the already “increasingly lopsided Negro-to-white unemployment ratio as the dock, factory, and mine operations where Negroes have hitherto found their steadiest employment are cybernated” (pp. 14–15).
4. Michael listed four choices for unskilled adolescents to join the automated workforce: “They can stay in school, for which they are unsuited either by motivation or by intelligence; they can seek training that will raise them out of the untrained work force; they can compete in the growing manpower pool of those seeking relatively unskilled jobs, or they can loaf. If they loaf, almost inevitably they are going to become delinquent. Thus, without adequate occupational outlets for these youths, cybernation may contribute substantially to further social disruption” (pp. 22–23).
5. See James Reston, “Washington: The Cold War Switches to the House,” New York Times, 14 March 1962.
6. Arthur J. Goldberg noted that while ninety thousand jobs would be lost due to imports allowed by lowering tariffs, one hundred fifty thousand jobs would be created with every additional billion dollars of exports. He made this observation while defending Kennedy’s trade bill, which sought to lower tariffs with the European Common Market (John D. Morris, “Goldberg Says Tariff Cuts Will Spur Net Gains in Jobs,” New York Times, 14 March 1962).
7. King made similar comments in a speech to the Eleventh Constitutional Convention of the Transport Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO, on 5 October 1961, calling automation’s impact on labor a catastrophe: “We are neither technologically advanced nor socially enlightened, if we witness this disaster for tens of thousands, without finding a solution. And by ‘solution,’ I mean a real and genuine alternative, providing the same living standards and opportunities which were swept away by a force called ‘progress,’ but which for some, means destruction.”
Source: New York Amsterdam News, 28 April 1962.