THE TANGLED WEB

...From the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act (YF_~DI~A) of 1977, Congress set aside for the Labor Department a $200 million "discretionary fund" to find better ways to create jobs...

...I THETANGLEDWEB RICHARD ARMSTRONG Federal programs for the migrant workers It's spring again and more than birds are on the wing...

...In one way or another, migrancy must be ended...

...Their presence in agriculture keeps wages pitifully low and weakens unionization efforts.The Carter administration is trying to deal with this problem but it seemsunlikely that immigrationreform in any meaningful shape will get through this Congress...

...It's all very confusing...

...Migrant Headstartinvolves about one percent of migrant children...

...Yet each accounts for a single "slot...

...Government services reach only a small proportion of the farmworker population...

...Those of us who can afford it will get our peaches and berries on time...

...It is, for that matter, the difference between a dramatist and a publicist...

...The Pennsylvania Farm Labor Plan, if implemented, would bca model for other states...

...The system refers to the means by which toe workers are hired...

...Instead of looking at agricultural policy or rural manpower as a whole,, the federal government has tried over the last ten years to bandage the wounds of those mangled by the system...

...If ~he experts don't know what to do, where do we go from here...

...We don't have structures, people who can administer programs...

...Off~ials conerie there isn't enough time to train an applicant, or that the jobs for which they're being trained (welder, air-conditioning repair, auto mechanic) don't exist in rural areas...

...Coordinationof governmentpolicies and programs can reduce some of the harm, but positive good depends on what happens outside government...

...The toll is taken on those least able to prote:t themselves--the farmworkers...

...Previous efforts have failed, but hope has to spring eternal...

...Ashortage of workers would bring wages up to a point at which local people would be willing to do harvest work in the northern states...

...It doesn't tell if the person will stay on the job, or if the worker is happy or if he or she might have 26 May 1978:334 benefited more by a longer period of training or more ed.ucstion...

...it is impossible to compare what has been made of more recent events with, say, Robert Sherwood's speculations about Lincoln...

...Right now, anything but a shortage of workers exists...

...Ray Marshall, head of ~he Labor Department, built his reputation at the University of Texas as a rural economist...

...That is what distinguishes "docu-dramas" from dramas based in history...

...They represent that stage in our culture where controversy and passion cool sufficiently to make way for revisionism...

...This, then, lies at the heart of what is wrong with "docu-dramas...

...Local forces usually keep farmworker programs tame and unthreetening...

...None of them is very accurate anyway, since they are often "windshield counts," by which someone drives by a field and estimates how many people are, or should be, working there...

...Migrant health programs, of their nature more likely to be measured, do the best --about 15 percent...

...or, worse, that it requires simple visual imagery to get the message across--learning, even about World War II, should be fun, or at any rate passive...

...There doesn't appear to be any coherent rural employment policy...

...When it comes to employment, no other major industry operates on such a hit-and-miss basis...

...Of the $250 million allocated for farmworkers, the Department of Labor's CETA farmworker program accounts for more t,han $67 millionmsecond only to HEW's $130 million...

...For various purposes, the federal bureaucracy uses five different statistical services, according to Rural America, Inc., a non-profit organization in Washington...

...The Department of Labor approaches job training with a "manpower bias...

...Prime sponsors for CETA are usually county governments, which are strongly influenced by conservative interests---namely growers...

...Illegal workers depress wages for everybody...

...Although it would probably be beter to give a crisp new hundred.dollar bill to each person who harvests our crops, we are going to See government programs continue...

...First of all, we have to admit that nothing ,has really changed for farmworkers, and that government efforts aren't likely to bring about much change...

...I think in that connection of one Catholic magazine's complaint that "Holocaust" represented no worse than what is taking place in abortion clinics around the country, the kind of insane comparison that gripped elements of the Left during the Indochina war...

...It was clear from the beginning what was going to happen to that family, and whatever drama there might have been was discarded at the beginning...

...The West Side Planning Gr0up in Fresno, trainsfarmworkers on its 455-acre tract to become farmers themselves...

...I gtcF.~mJ ARMSTRON~ is a consultantto the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation ]or ]armworker employment issues.Room for improvement is almost limitless...

...Proposals to unify the approach---or even to better coordinate programs---tend to be met with resistance, partly out of turf-protection, partly out of genuine bewilderment on how to do it...

...It is "Sesame Street" brought to Modern European History...

...But the massiveness of the problem can't stop us from continuing to try...

...The government has no unified definition on who a farmworker is, or how many there are~both migrant and seasonal...

...It was also, in its way, a kind of family soap opera of a very familiar type: tracing one line down through the years, although in that case through a remarkable (and almost unique) sequence of events...

...The execution of Private Slovik, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the love life of the Franklin Roosevelts, the Cuban missile crisis ---one can nearly imagine what future topics will be: the Hiss case, Sacco-Vanzetti, perhaps Loeb and Leopold will at long last be exonerated...

...Migrants travel miles and find others have beaten them to the melon field in North Carolina---or that their crew leader lied to them about wages or housing...

...A quarter of a billion dollars, the amount allocated for the farm workers, can't be all bad--even if it averages out to $100 apiece for the nation's (by one estimate) 2.5 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families...

...And some are doing good, These are .usually private groups which use a mix of government and private funds...

...State employment services are bypassed by grower and farmworker alike...

...in fact, in the case of World War II, was nearly overdone...

...What is wrong with bringing true footage to life...

...Docu-dramas" have been with us for a few years now, and it is difficult what to make of them...

...You'd tell then you don't need it because you can buy your children whatever they need...

...It seemed at some points in the 1950s you could not get through the week without witnessing "Victory at Sea" or Walter Cronkite portending into the microphone on this or that crisis of the twentieth century...

...What is the point...

...The net effect may be that as a farmworker, your child may be eligible for Daycare while you may not fit the requirements (a minimum of 25 days and maximum of 150 days in farm work) to be trained for a better paying occupation under the Departmentof Labor's Comprehensive Employment and Training Act for farmworkers...

...i wonder how long they will succeed, however, because their nature is not necessarily so palatable for so long...

...History in the wrong hands is volatile, and the misunderstanding of historyRSO palpable in network manufacturings---is a menace...

...And we won't think much about the chaotic and oppressive system that somehow gets the fresh fruit and vegetables onto our dinner table...

...Holocaust" might have done the same thing, and if it were to be true to history would have: the saga of the Jews in Germany did not begin in 1933, and it did not end in 1945...

...That's what the farmworker wants to be able to say...

...The greatest fault of "Holocaust" 26 May 1978:336...

...It's painful and frustrating to realize that, forty years after The Grapes of Wrath, and twenty years afterMurrow's Harvest of Shame, conditions have barely improved for farmworkers...

...One justification for "Holocaust" was that it served to educate a generation that did not grow up in the wake of the real thing...

...The nation's farmworkers have already moved out of their dingy shacks in Florida and Texas and California and are following the migratory season north...

...I~ costs up to $7,000 to train a health worker, while it is much cheaper to get someone into a low-level clerical job...

...Bring "the problem" downto its simplest human terms, Antonio Orendain, head of the tiny Texas Farm Commonweal: 335 Workers' Union, has said many times: "If you were a doctor or a lawyer, and somebody brought you a Christmas basket, what would you say...

...Of course, we have always had a fondness for sackcloth and ashes, but it is only recently that television has joined the throng...

...Many of these efforts overlap or conflict...

...They throw away their subject...

...It seems that any visual medium has a certain advantage in our documented age...

...Who wants innovation that might shift the economic or political power into the hands of the powerless...

...And they really don't know what todo...

...Many of them would become negotiators of union contracts, and this could be a threat to the power of the growers...

...His colleague in academia was Lamond Godwin, now in charge of National Programs at Labor...

...About $15 miltion was set aside for the CETA farmworker program...

...The confusion," says Rural America, "produces a situation where all statistical services use the same terminology to describe and count substantially different populations...

...Illegal aliens from Mexico cross the border faster than the Immigration and Naturalization Service can apprehend thcmmandlast year they nabbedover one million...

...The sum was to be for the English language training of UFW members...

...Economic aid to Mexico, through international agencies such as the World Bank, would do more to reduce the flow Of illegals than a border cop every 500 yards from Brownsville to Calexico...

...It used to be done rather frequently...

...With some exceptions--notably in San Jose, California's booming electronic industry--one comes away from job training sites vaguely depressed...

...Acomprehensive rural employmentpolicy by the federal government would bcabig help...

...That meanscreating year-roundemploymentin the states where most migrants livemnotably Texas and Florida...

...The Center for Employment andTraining (CET) in San Jose, Calif., has trained over 8,000 people in the last ten years in well-paying jobs in theelectronics industry...

...It seems to have stirred a greater tempest among critics than among its potential audience and, as is so often the case, revealed attitudes that make one fear for the future...

...We don't have an effective mechanism to get programs out to these places...

...There is no predictability for either worker or employer...

...Not long ago there was a speculative trial of Lee Harvey Oswald which permitted all the convenient theories of subsequent years to be transported in time for the illumination of John Kennedy's assassination...

...I contend that, where television is carrying the message, actual photographs are better than an actor and an imperfect impersonation...

...Between some of them there are yawning gaps.-The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Labor Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Community Services Administration and the Legal Services Administration all have some part in serving farmworkers...

...Manpower programs touch (often lightly) at most ten percent of those eligible for job training...

...Most of them won't be able to say it this Spring...

...Godwin frankly admitted: "We've been asked by Congress to do something we're not well staffed to carry out....We don't know ,how to deal with problems of disadvantaged people in rural areas...

...This leaves television with a couple of alternatives...

...Well, that is the sort of debate about integrity in the news that Edward R. Murrow lost twenty years ago, and there is not likely to be much of an argument, particularly when "docu-dramas" succeed in the ratings...

...Beginning with the Office of Economic Opportunity and continuing through other agencies, government workers have tried to provide health services, education, better housing, transportation and other auxiliary services to farmworkers...

...Nearly every one I have seen has been devoted to an event about which there is a kind of evolutionary attitude, or where the certainties of yesteryear are called at long last into question...

...The Labor Department took a courageous step in January when it awarded $500,000 to the United Farm Workers in California, only to see Cesar Chavez turn the offer down after pressure from growers put hobbling restrictions on its use...

...So, then, with "Holocaust...

...HOLOCAUST' AS DOCU-DIAMA 0000000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TELEVISION It would seem that the television audience can absorb only one cathartic per year...

...In the long run, the farmworkers themselves will have to take hold of their problems, and the UFW appears to bc the only group with enough of a national following to do the job over, say, twenty years...

...So would more enlightened self-intereston the part of growers...

...That supposes, of course, that a contrived drama is somehow a superior education to reading...

...There has never been much debate about file matters treated in the two programs--at any rate it would be difficult to find apologists for slave-traders and Nazis--and so what is of interest about them is their format...

...Roots" was rather different in that it repeated what must truly be a consensus about America's historic treatment of blacks, but mixed as well with its author's trans-racial notion that a knowledge of one's ancestors is an essential ingredient of happiness...

...This is disputed by many growers but their argument justifies so much exploitationthat it must remain suspect...

...Program Funding in New York State has a good reputation for helping farmworkers...

...It takes something more than a good treatment and some clever casting toequal what has been done before, and it takes as well a certain philosophical insight into history to make something of what is, after all, only one damn battle after another...

...The shape-up system at the HidalgoReynosa Bridge in the Rio Grande Valley is the scene of much disappointment for Mexican workers who rise at 3 a.m., cross the border legally and come up emptyhanded...

...CocaCola's Agricultural andLaborProgram in Florida is tryingto persuade other growers in the state to stabilize their harvest crews andimprovetheir tarnished image by treating workers more humanely...

...Foundations and enlightened corporations could do more to fund the most promising groups helping farmworkers, whether in employment,education or legal rights...

...Job training itself is criticized as being too short in duration and too narrow in conception...

...It is all very well to render historical events into fiction, but with the example of Shakespeare looming overhead scriptwriters ought to be careful...

...This provides a way to measure how many persons were fit into how many job slots over a certain period of time and at a fixed cost...

...Whatever may be said about "Holocaust" it did not provoke the sort of mass response that greeted "Roots," and that is probably just as well...

...Innovation and the sharing of power will never come about as long as rural interests control federal moneys...

...Some commercial decision, however, seems to have been made along the line, to wit that documentaries don't sell, or fiction moves better than non-fiction, as any drugstore owner could tell you...