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Show Assistant Labor Secretary Urges Planning Now For New Jobs Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson, speaking at the state convention of the Utah AFL-CIQ in Orem, urged all communities with sizeable defense de-fense production and no industrial indus-trial diversification to organize joint labor management efforts to prepare in advance for any sudden change in civilian or military requirements which can defense production needs. "The Defense Department under un-der Secretary McNamara is now making an unusually strong effort ef-fort to fulfill its public relations responsibilities in advising the communities and industries affected af-fected on the reasons for the many and frequent changes in defense procurement policies sudden closing down or phasing defense procurement. There is nothing more than good community com-munity prosperity insurance. The objective should be to try to diversify industry in the community com-munity so that it is not a town completely dependent for its economic survival on one product prod-uct made by one firm for one customer," she said. cause large scale local unemployment. unem-ployment. "This is nothing more than good community prosperity insurance in-surance for fashions and accessories acces-sories in defense items go out of style perhaps even faster than women's clothes." Noting that 10.3 per cent of all non-agricultural civilian employment em-ployment in Utah is now concentrated con-centrated in defense jobs, Mrs. Peterson said this was one of the highest such state averages in the nation, exceeded only by the states of Washington with 10.6 per cent and Alaska with 10.4 per cent. Of other states, only Virginia and Connecticut have between 9 per cent and 10 per cent averages. "We are spending more than $50 billion a year on weapons and the personnel to man those weapons not as a means of providing pro-viding employment to labor, of course, on contracts to business but because we must spend the huge sums for the survival and our way of life. Employment and profits are not the controlling control-ling factors. "There are bound to be periodic pe-riodic and serious dislocations to groups of workers and to particular par-ticular localities and weapons systems are abandoned or superseded, super-seded, as research and technology technol-ogy advance, and as plants become be-come dangerously obsolete for I out or deactivization of a military mili-tary installation or airplane or missile or component. "In the many years during which I have been involved in or concerned with this kind of problem, first in the labor movement move-ment and now in the government, govern-ment, I have never known the Defense Department to be as alert as it is now to the human aspects and the community aspects as-pects of its decisions to make significant changes in weapons or in the location of installations. It is also conscientiously trying to help all such localities adversely ad-versely affected. "The Defense Department's responsibility to get into community com-munity assistance programs begins be-gins only after an employment and business crisis has already been created for the locality by a Pentagon decision. I do not think the individual community should wait for a crisis in order to begin to do the things it may have to do in case of an employment em-ployment crisis. "It seems to me that every community with sizeable defense production and defense related employment should be doing as a regular thing the kind of planning plan-ning and re-evaluation and critical crit-ical self analysis which would be thrust upon it in case of a production or employment crisis caused by a sudden change in |