Keep America employed--get a haircut. The Cambridge barber business that once thrived on crew cuts and flattops is now starving on long hair.

Local barber shops have lost from 20 to 60 per cent of their business in the past several years, with the real plunge coming since last fall. The University Barber Shop on Mass. Ave., which used to employ nine barbers, now has a staff of six, only three of whom are full-time.

Some barbers, like Salvatore Gidari of the University Barber shop, blame the style on protest action against the war. But the protest has hit the barbers more than the country's politics. "Believe me," Gidari said, "I'm a barber, I didn't start this war. We'd like to see it end just as quickly as anyone else."

Irrelevancy?

Most of the barbers say that the length of a boy's hair is irrelevant, just as long as it is kept neat and clean. They feel a monthly visit to a barber is necessary to keep hair looking good.

Other barbers are not so broad-minded, however. One said, "It took 2000 years to get up from the cave; why do they want to go back?"

They all speak nostalgically of the good old days when students got haircuts once every two weeks. Now they often wait from one to six months to go back under the scissors after a cut.

The barber shop in the Commander Hotel, run by Larry and Joe Cerella, has been hardest hit. Their shop, which has catered mostly to students in the ten years that they have been running it, has lost 60 per cent of its business.

Larry Cerella said yesterday, "This long hair's ruining me, but I love those guys. We're 100 per cent for the students and we're against the war."

His customers are mostly Harvard graduate students, although some come from as far as Tufts and M.I.T.

The atmosphere, which he says is "just like home," is not the only attraction of the hotel's shop. Their non-union price of $1.75 undercuts the Harvard Square shops by fifty cents.

There was no consensus among the barbers about future trends in hair styles. Rocco, of the Holyoke Barber Shop, said that they will change soon--either longer or shorter. "No kicks otherwise," he added.