The Two Halves

Finding jobs for the unemployed is only half the battle of the slums--perhaps the easier half at that. Detroit industry, which provided 23,000 jobs for slum dwellers after the July riots, is discovering that it is at least as difficult to keep the hard-core unemployed at work as it was to find work for them in the first place.

"They drift in, and they drift out," explains William N. Wilson Jr., employment director of the Detroit Urban League. Probably no more than a quarter of the 23,000 men originally hired are still at work; at Chrysler, which hired 12,000, the figure is no better than one in ten. "Maybe 100,000 persons have been working on all 23,000 jobs in the past five months," says Wilson. Chrysler was so shocked by its own record that it has given a local social agency $500,000 to find out what went wrong.

The truth may be that most people underestimate the problems of motivating men who never had a decent job in their lives--nor until last summer ever had much hope. General Motors has had great success in its Pontiac plant (219 of the 230 hired after the riot in that city were still at work last month), the apparent reason being the city's smalltown, clannish social structure. Older workers often know the new men, cover up for them when they do something wrong, find out where they are if they fail to report to work.

The Nitty-Gritty. G.M. is now trying to foster a similar attitude in its Chevrolet gear-and-axle plant on the fringe of one of Detroit's worst slums. Its solution: an eleven-member committee of overseers that does for the unmotivated unemployed what Alcoholics Anonymous does for the overly motivated drinker. When one of die newly hired slum dwellers misses the whistle on Monday morning, one of the eleven goes to his house, wakes him up, dresses him, gives him a cup of coffee--and delivers him at the factory gate.

"It doesn't do any good to send a social worker around to these people," says Wilson, who has cooperated with G.M. on the scheme. "You've got to be one of them. If a guy doesn't show up for work, you tell him that his friends are going to get after him for letting them down. That's the kind of thing that works."

In a major effort to find out what other kinds of things work in upgrading the slums, the Ford Foundation last week announced that it will grant $10,800,000 to four universities--Chicago, Harvard, M.I.T. and Columbia--for studies of inner-city problems. The money will allow the universities to endow 14 major chairs in urbanology, provide also for the training of 65 doctoral candidates, 390 graduate students and 390 undergraduates.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.