Employment: Help!

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Unemployment in the U.S., at latest count, stands at 3.7% of the labor force, lowest since the Korean War. Gardner Ackley, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, recently called the developing labor shortage the U.S.'s single most serious inflationary threat. That the shortage is already critical in many areas has now become abundantly evident across the nation.

The Los Angeles Times has been running as many as 14 pages of help-wanted ads daily. On posters plastered all over the Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. grounds in Sunnyvale, Calif., an Indian sends up smoke signals above the caption "Spread the Word"; the word is that Lockheed has an immediate need for 2,000 workers. Douglas Aircraft Co. has been luring engineers with a $100,000 savings plan that is above and beyond normal retirement benefits. In Cincinnati, General Electric is offering present workers bonuses of up to $200 for every new employee they successfully recruit. Monsanto has started running help-wanted ads on TV in Dayton. Ford's Lincoln-Mercury assembly plant in St. Louis is using spot radio commercials, has set up portable employment offices at several shopping centers.

Imported Mountaineers. To staff its mills in Chicago and Gary, where the labor market is at its tightest, U.S. Steel announced last week that it would try to recruit 1,000 workers in Pittsburgh. According to San Francisco's Ampex, the necessity of looking farther afield for technicians has increased its recruiting costs from $3,000 to nearly $5,000 a man.

Some companies are considering waiving mandatory retirement for workers with good records; others seek to attract moonlighters by offering wages 10% to 12% above normal for night shifts. The Atlanta post office has been hiring women to load trucks and trundle small mail carts around the downtown district; in Pittsburgh, Westinghouse has moved women into machine-shop and stockroom jobs normally held by men. Many companies profess that a return to the days of Rosie the Riveter is not far away.

Hundreds of companies are now taking unskilled workers and putting them through special training programs to teach them specific skills. Liberally backed by a dozen firms, a young priest in a predominantly Negro area near San Francisco opened a training school last fall to teach typing and electronics-assembly techniques. He has placed 30 graduates in jobs and has 250 more now attending classes.

Workers, even for unskilled jobs, are scarce. Detroit automakers have imported unemployed mountaineers from Appalachia to sweep floors at $3 an hour. In western Pennsylvania, General Laborers Local 1058 says it will be cleaned out of common laborers for construction jobs at $3.71 an hour by June. Inland Steel has 600 openings for unskilled workers, has had to hire 150 college students just to fill vacancies in its weekend cleanup gangs.

Down to 2.5%? Washington also is hurting. In a job hopper's market, the voluntary "quit rate" in all Government professional categories climbed from 4.9% in 1964 to 6.1% last year, is expected to run as high as 12% this year. The Government has consequently stepped up its campus recruiting program. It anticipates hiring 10,000 green college graduates this year, a third again as many as it put to work last year.