Speech #920096016

The Department of Labor maintains that most of these farmworkers will be eligible to participate in the home base phases of the program because they come from the Southeastern regionFlorida. North and South Carolina. But the same logic would seem to hold for the migrants in the Great Lakes States who also are interstate migrants with home bases largely in the South and the Southwest. In any case. why extend the possibility of benefitting from instream settleout programs and supportive social services to migrants in the Midwest. but deny them to those on the east coast? Moreover. between 30.000 and 35.000 Puerto Rican farmworkers annually leave the island in search of employment in the east coast stream. These migrants are eligible for neither homebase nor instream phases of the program. This is outright discrimination against a significant portion of the migrant population. If the first year of this socalled comprehensive manpower program for migrant farmworkers is essentially an experiment or pilot project. then I contend that the evidence gathered from this experiment will be inaccurate and biased because the sample of 6.000 migrants will not adequately reflect the composition of the migrant population. Finally. I want to point out that even though many phases of the programand perhaps the whole projectwill be run by contracts with local. migrantbased organizations. all aspects of the program will be under the control of the national office of the Rural Manpower Service. that is. the Farm Labor Service. The Department of Labor is now conducting an investigation of charges of ineffectiveness. bias. grower control. and outright fraud in the Farm Labor Service and a lawsuit filed by Migrant Legal Action. Inc.. has called for the abolition of the agency and its replacement by a workerorganized and operated service. I question the wisdom of assigning a multimilliondollar manpower program to an agency under investigation and whose dedication to migrant is doubtful. I am very worried about this manpower program and the way the whole situation has been handled. I hope the Rural Manpower Service will become the chief advocate and protector of migrant interests. but on the basis of past history I am not at all certain this will come about. Congress must very carefully oversee this new program and make sure it is designed and implemented in such a way as to achieve its worthy objective.