JOBS: The Elusive Objective of Full Employment

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He contends that the nation should develop "an array of target unemployment rates for different segments of the labor force." Unfortunately, much more analytical work will have to be done before economists or Government officials can decide with any assurance what would be realistic, achievable target employment rates for, say, blacks, women and teenagers.

What Not to Do. How to reach whatever targets might be set? The way not to do it is to adopt the AFL-ClO-Humphrey-Hawkins approach. This inevitably would pump so much money into the economy as to raise demand to the point at which employers sign on almost anybody who shows up, with the Government hiring the residue, many in make-work jobs. A non-partisan study last May by the Library of Congress indicated that an attempt to get the overall jobless rate down to 3% within 18 months would push inflation back up to "a 12% to 13% annual rate" initially, and even more later on. One reason: long before employers hired the last ghetto black or unskilled high-schooler, severe shortages of skilled technical and professional workers would develop, leading to low productivity and inflationary wage boosts. Such a program would be self-defeating, because unrestrained inflation eventually causes job-destroying recession—by pricing houses out of the reach of people who might want to buy them, for instance.

Rather than a crash program, the nation needs years of steady growth in production at somewhere around the 6% pace widely predicted for 1976 to come anywhere close to full employment. In order to achieve 6% economic expansion for several years, the Government may well have to adopt more generous money-supply, tax and spending policies. But even steady growth will not solve the problems of low skills and high turnover rates among would-be workers that now contribute so heavily to high unemployment. The nation also needs supplementary programs offering specific help to the people who now find it hardest to get and hold jobs. Among steps that should be taken:

> Vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws and "affirmative action" programs to stimulate the hiring of women and blacks.

— Expansion and redirection of Government-financed job-training programs. Economist Charles Holt of the Urban Institute, a private research organization, suggests that the Government finance more programs to train semiskilled workers to move up into highly skilled jobs. That would open up more semiskilled jobs.

> Easing of the transition between school and work—which is now much rougher in the U.S. than it is in many other industrial countries. Former Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, for example, calls for setting up local community-education-work councils. These help students with career planning—and help schools train them for jobs that actually will be there.

— Making the minimum wage lower for teen-agers than for adults. At present employers must pay the same basic minimum—$2.30 an hour as of New Year's Day—to workers of all ages. That requirement prices out of the market many youths looking for their first jobs.