The 40-Hour Week

The country was in another tumult over labor. The South led the uproar. Every day on its front page Oklahoma City’s Oklahoman asked that its readers “solemnly pledge that I will refuse to vote for the re-election of any U.S. Senator or Congressman who does not consistently vote for a law outlawing all strikes in every industry connected with defense and who does not vote to abolish the limitations of 40-hour week labor. . . .”

The Dallas, Tex. Morning News declared: “Factories which can turn out 1,000 instruments of war a week are only turning out 500. Why? Because there is a law which says men should work only 40 hours a week. . . . Is there a law which says our sons must fight only 40 hours a week or die only 40 hours a week?” Wrath swept the South “like a prairie fire.” Citizens held meetings, wrote to Washington.

Radio commentators in their tensest voices blew up the balloon. Editorial writers recalled the 40-hour week in France and the fall of that nation. Many a U.S. citizen got the impression that thousands of U.S. workers were on strike, that hundreds of thousands were sabotaging the war effort in order to maintain a New Deal gain. The facts:

> While no two Administration reports agreed, none showed more than a negligible number of strikes. War Production Board figures for the first two weeks in March showed that only two strikes, with 1,800 workers out, had affected national defense. (On March 13: no defense strikes whatsoever.) Measured against some 7,500,000 workers in war industries, these figures were microscopic.

> Many a citizen had the wrong idea about the 40-hour-week law. As Mr. Roosevelt took pains to point out, that law did not limit hours of work; WPB figures on hours worked in seven key war industries showed machine-tool workers busy 55 hours a week; engine & turbine, 51.1; aircraft, 48.7; shipbuilding, 48.2; machinery, 47.1; aluminum, 45.9; iron & steel, 41.3. Behind a lot of senseless clamor, the critics of labor had one essential point: labor is getting time-and-a-half for hours worked over 40 hours a week and often double time on Sundays and holidays even within the 40 hours. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard admitted that overtime payments on $56,000,000,000 worth of war contracts might amount to $4,000,000,000. In short, labor has a good thing in the war, a better thing than any other large group except possibly the farmers, a good thing that looks bad compared to the sacrifices made by the men in the armed forces.

Congressmen were inspired and frightened by the deluge of mail. Virginia’s lean, soft-spoken Congressman Howard W. Smith, who has tried, tried, and tried again to club labor with legislation, came forward with his newest dreamboat: a bill to throw out all closed-shop contracts for the duration, wipe out all wage-hour agreements, overtime payments.

The Administration was caught off guard. Why the sudden outcry? Washington thought the people were depressed by a succession of military defeats. It was even suggested that the outcry was a Nazi plot. Said WPB’s Donald Nelson: “The Nazis do not like our production drive. The enemy is clever at this sort of thing. He has done it successfully before. He knows that this is his crucial test. Unless he can divide this nation now, he is licked.”

The Administration sent Mr. Nelson, Mr. Bard, Lieut. General William Knudsen, War Department’s Robert Patterson, the Maritime Commission’s leathery Admiral Land into the breach. To a man they deplored stoppages, no matter how small. But their main point: the Smith Bill would cause an uprising in labor, provoke disunity, wreck the war effort.

One clause of the Smith bill limited all profits to 6% for any tax period, which might break the back of a company with a long-term contract, would allow other companies with short-term contracts to make fantastic profits. The bill was smothered as it drew first breath.

But this week Administration ramparts weakened. Nelson told labor it should not demand doubletime for Sundays and holidays. Speaker Rayburn said even more: workers should work 48 hours before they collected time-and-a-half pay.

The country’s uproar was not choked off. It never would be, until the Administration defined once & for all its wartime labor policy. Otherwise suspicion would continue to exasperate everybody—as it did on other fronts last week:

> In Detroit, General Motors and United Auto Workers opened negotiations by slugging each other with charges and counter-charges. Both sides were apparently prepared to fight until the Government hauled them apart.

> Thurman Arnold, Assistant Attorney General, still disgusted at having been court-thwarted in his attempt to end A.F. of L. racketeering, charged labor with deliberately obstructing the war effort. Organized labor, said he, exploited the farmers, impeded transportation, made cheap mass production of housing impossible, forced businessmen to employ “useless and unnecessary workers.”

> Suspicion blighted an innocent idea of WPBoss Donald Nelson. To stimulate production, Nelson decided to experiment in setting up joint labor-management plant committees, selected a few “guinea pig” plants to try it out. By mistake the plan was prematurely given full-blown national publicity. Newspapers, management, labor ran off in all directions at once, yelling bloody murder. The New York Times quoted General Electric’s Vice President William R. Burrows as calling them “speed-up committees,” likened them to the Murray Industrial Councils plan to give labor a voice in management. To labor leaders, “speed-up” was anathema.

To management, the Murray plan was socialistic horror. Actually the plan had been laid out simply as an effort to get labor and management to lay aside mutual suspicion and join in attempts to get more efficient production. But it got off on the wrong foot.