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Edward KocheEdward Koche
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Session:         Page of 617

only did they make themselves eligible -- and I supported that -- but they also got the city to take the position that they would have the first crack at a vacant job that was available under the CETA line, and secondly, that if the private sector had people available and they had been hired by the city, that the city would fire such a person and hire in that person's place a laid off city worker, which I thought was a goddamn outrage, because it gave them two cracks at this WPA job: (1) if there was a vacancy, and (2) if somebody had been hired, they could push him out and take the job away and put in a laid off municipal worker. So I made a big stink about that publicly and tried to get the Committee on Education and Labor and the sub-committee in particular. I went to see Dom Daniels, who was a Congressman from New Jersey and he said, “I agree with you; this was never the intent of Congress, and we will try to change it.” They called in the Labor Department, and the Labor Department and they said, “Well, the language is written in a way that we think that if the union sued that they could get this.” And Daniels did not want to pursue a change in the law to clarify the language. But this was all public, and I published all the correspondence on it.

So I get this call from Victor Gottbaum, which was very much like the call I got in ‘68. It went something like this; “Ed, I just heard [laughs] that you are trying to stop the CETA program and you're trying to push the workers out” -- you know,





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