MANPOWER: A Congress Unconvinced

The chance, never large, that Congress might pass a national service act vanished for good last week. Good news from the battlefronts sent optimism soaring like a balloon. Many a Congressman asked himself why the U.S. needed such a measure at this bright stage of the war.

Meanwhile, news from the home front stiffened opposition to any other kind of work law at all. The Mead (ex-Truman) Committee had swooped into the Norfolk Navy Yard, triumphantly brought out a report of labor surplus and waste there. Congressmen’s mail told of bad management and “stretch-outs” (making a little job last a long time). Typical report: “I have worked for two weeks on a job I could have finished in two days.”

Congressmen reasoned that all that was needed was a good cleanout; there was no real labor pinch, that where there were local shortages, the voluntary methods advocated by organized labor and the N.A.M. would probably do the trick. Cleveland was launching such a campaign. Even the War Manpower Commission might be able to handle things. WMC had bared its muscle in Allentown, Pa., and had put high-paid brewery workers in munitions plants. Congress relaxed.

No Letdown. But Army & Navy officials thought the need for a work-or-fight law was sharper than ever. The week’s good news pointed up the armed services’ greatest fear—that the end of the European war would cause a disastrous letdown on the home front.

There would be no letdown for soldiers now fighting in Europe, many of whom could expect to be fighting in the Pacific within a few months after Germany’s surrender. Barring wounds or illness, no more than a million and a half of them are going to be demobilized until Japan is defeated.

Yet the May-Bailey bill, which empowers local draft boards to shunt men (including 4-Fs) aged 18-45 into essential industries and keep them there, was tht only legislation in sight. It was a little bedraggled by the time, last week, the House Military Affairs Committee hung it with its last amendment and finally reported it out. Now on the floor of the House, even this mild, makeshift measure faced an uncertain fate.