developed countries of the world has become an overriding goal of all of the economic and technical assistance programs of the United States. Domestic unemployment and other U.S. economic problems have caused increased concern regarding the relative position of the United States in international trade and have pointed up the need for more effective policy and action regarding labor standards in foreign countries which compete with the United States for world trade.

"Consequently . . . there has been an acceleration and intensification of the work the Department of Labor does in the international field." (1961: 145)

As an effective attack on these difficult problems, the Department has developed (1) an overseas staff which provides expert factual and analytical reporting concerning the political, economic, and organizational aspirations and problems of foreign labor; (2) research, by a competent Washington staff, on world-wide labor developments which affect U.S. foreign policies and operations and a publications program to acquaint interested governmental and nongovernmental officials with these developments; (3) formulation of effective foreign policies, responsive to the particular labor situations in countries and regions; and (4) effective utilization of a variety of specific governmental action programs. (1962)

Employees' Compensation

As a direct result of legislature changes made in the Federal Employees' Compensation Act as amended by P.L. 87-767, benefits were greatly extended. But, to bring home to Federal establishments and agencies the need for greater attention to financial cost of accident injuries, and illnesses, these agencies are now, for the first time in history, required to reimburse the Federal Employees' Compensation Fund for some of these expenditures. (1961: 49)

In addition to its Federal employees' compensation program, the Department administers a compensation program which provides benefits for the following groups of employees: (1) persons (other than seamen) in the employ of private employers engaged in certain maritime employment on the navigable waters of the United States, (2) private employees in the District of Columbia, (3) employees employed at military bases outside the United States, (4) employees of contractors with the United States engaged in public work outside the United States, including contracts approved by the Agency for International Development under the Mutual Security Act, (5) employees engaged in services for an American employer providing welfare services for the Armed Forces outside the United States, (6) employment on the Outer Continental Shelf in connection with the exploration and developing of natural resources, (7) civilian employees of nonappropriated fund activities (post exchanges, motion picture services, etc.). (1962)

CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE

1962-63

On September 25, 1962, W. Willard Wirtz was sworn in as the 10th Secretary of Labor of the United States. Some 3 months later, the Department of Labor began the anniversary observance of its 50th year. It was an apt time for a consideration of the changing character of the Department and for a confrontation of the problems emerging in an economy undergoing rapid technological change.

Surprisingly enough, as the reports in this volume have indicated, the problems were not different in kind from those that had occupied every other Secretary. Secretary Davis in the 1920's had cast worried glances at man's evolving technology and its effect upon jobs. Some 40 years later, Secretary Wirtz found the American economy laboring under the same change, with an increasing toll of employment opportunity loss for the unskilled and inexperienced and untrained.

During the first months of his tenure, and as the 50th anniversary year began, the Secretary identified the correlation of almost every activity of his Department with the overriding challenge of change-industrial, occupational, scientific, and geographic-that was remaking modern America faster than the lives of generations and causing each man to consider his working lifetime a many-staged progression through a variety of skills and jobs.

The special programs and policies to turn change to man's benefit were being established-to end discrimination, to improve educational and employment opportunity, to better the status of women, to convince young people to stay in school, to upgrade the Employment Service with its jobmatching capability, and so down the long list of detailed responses to specific aspects of change.

As the first half-century of service came to an end, the words of Secretary Wirtz were both a summation and a mandate for the future.

Dealing With Change

"I am sure it is an oversimplification, and yet I am equally sure that the presiding fact in our time and in any other times is the fact of change, and that the common denominator of all of our difficulties is dealing with change honestly and wisely and constructively.

"I am not talking about a matter of adjusting to change, because that begs the question, and begs it, in my judgment, the wrong way. It is not a matter of how to be on the defensive against change. It is a matter of how to take the offensive with change and to make it the instrument for a man's

deliverance, instead of permitting it to become the instrument of his destruction.

...

"Now, a job used to be-and this was true not very long ago—a job used to be something that a man expected to have all of his life. And our trouble today is that that is what he still expects. But it is no longer true.

"It was not very long ago that a man on a job, particularly on a craftsman job, thought in terms of passing it on to his son. He had inherited it from his father, and he expected to pass it on to his son. It was like the family name, which came from the craft which was being performed-Smith, Mason, Chandler, whatever it may have been.

"That was the period when a boy in the country grew up and went to school past fields which he would probably work for the rest of his life. It was a period in which most sons grew up around a mine or a mill or a plant, which was the economic center of every family's thinking.

"And collective bargaining, when it emerged, as it did in most places, about 25 years ago, was also built up around the idea of protecting a man's particular job and his rights to a progression to another job.

"I suggest to you that today this is no longer true; that in this era of accelerated change, an age of technology triumphant, of exploding population, where maps change as fast as women's fashions and where continents are now closer together in time than county seats seem to be, in this age a man's job is also the uncertain product of unpredictable but almost certain change.

"A job is no longer something which most people can reasonably expect to have or to perform the rest of their lives. There is going to be a change.” Jobs

"I think there is one answer that underlies [our] problems.

“And that right answer is simply that this economy has got to be put on a basis which will supply work opportunities for all of those who want to work and who have something to offer.

"I make clear only the point that these other things which we react so strongly to are by and large posings of the issue, and we ought to get down to the one answer which would bring a complete solution to these problems. We would not be staying up nights in the Labor Department working out particular disputes if there were a full employment economy in this country. Featherbedding would still be an irritation and an aggravation, but it would not be the terrible problem that it is today.

"The 35-hour work week problem would disappear if there were full employment opportunities. The problem of compulsory arbitration would be pushed again into the background, because there would be other ways of solving those problems. The unemployment insurance problem would not be the serious problem that it is.

“I make, then, only the general suggestion that the principal problem we have in this situation in this area of public affairs is the problem of change,