The Economy: Jobs for 500,000

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Meeting with a group of baseball luminaries in the White House last week, Lyndon Johnson accepted a bat from Boston Red Sox Slugger Carl Yastrzemski, then clowned it up for photographers by faking a bunt. The action drew a telling comment from the American League batting champion. "You're too big to be a hunter," Yastrzemski chided the President. "You have to hit home runs."

That is precisely the problem, particularly in L.B.J.'s low-scoring innings with the niggardly 90th Congress. As he presented the first of a dozen new legislative programs to Congress last week, Johnson was clearly avoiding the temptation to swing away; he chose instead to punch out a few Texas leaguers.

Most ambitious of the new proposals is the $2.1 billion manpower program, under which the President hopes to forge a partnership between industry and Government to provide jobs for the hard-core unemployed. Last year's "concentrated employment program" conducted by the Labor Department identified some 500,000 Americans—mostly Negro, Puerto Rican and Mexican-American slum dwellers—who have never had jobs or who face serious employment handicaps.

Campaign Themes. Under JOBS (for Job Opportunities in Business Sector), the Government will refer the unskilled to one or another of 103 companies that have shown interest in the program. The firms would provide on-the-job training, with Washington picking up the tab for all extra costs (transportation, education, medical services) up to an annual $3,500 per worker. The aim: to put 100,000 hard-core unemployed on the job by June 1969, and 500,000 to work by 1971. To coordinate the plan, the President created a 65-man "Alliance committee," chaired by Henry Ford II, whose firm has already launched an ambitious program of recruiting from the ghetto. The new group also includes such leading businessmen as Coca-Cola President J. Paul Austin and Aircraft Manufacturer James S. McDonnell Jr.

Even at that, the President remained cautious about JOBS prospects. "It's better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all," he told reporters. The same spirit pervaded his other major message of the week: an eleven-page civil rights proposal that contained more rhetoric than innovation. Asking for no new legislation, Johnson concentrated on his major civil rights bills submitted but not passed during the last session: fair juries, fair housing, enforcement powers for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and stronger federal protection for those exercising civil rights. As important as anything in the two messages was the tone of expanded economic opportunity and sharper equal-rights legislation, which in all likelihood will be two of the President's main campaign themes for 1968.