MANPOWER: Park Bench Plan

Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch, after much pondering and consultationin his office (see cut), five weeks ago submitted a report to Home Front Czar James F. Byrnes on the much muddled problem of U.S. manpower. Czar Jimmy hugged the report to his well-tailored weskit, declined to reveal its contents. Last week, chivied by suspicious Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Czar Jimmy reluctantly released the report. The reason for his reluctance became plain. Though many of the details had leaked out, the sharp, critical tone had not come through.

Said plain-talking Mr. Baruch: “Proper handling of manpower has been made impossible by the failure of Government agencies to work as a team with a clearly defined program. Measures undertaken by one agency have been undone by the conflicting actions, or inactions of other agencies.”

Those who insisted that the report was as significant as the famed Baruch rubber report exaggerated. Baruch, assisted by Byrnes’s consultant John Hancock, had not intended to make an overall manpower study. At Czar Jimmy’s request, he had sat down with aircraft makers* on the bench in Washington’s Lafayette Park, and there had worked out a plan to avert a disastrous slump in West Coast airplane production. His recommendations, to set up a labor budget and balance West Coast manpower with production by funneling workers into essential plants, have already been put into effect (see p. 23). But, Baruchlike, he had not stopped there, but had gone on to make many a commonsensible suggestion to ease the manpower squeeze. Some of them:

>Draft deferments should be made on the basis of occupation rather than on family status. To draft war workers with irreplaceable skills while “leaving untouched millions of fathers not engaged in war work” would retard war production.

>Key aircraft workers, now in the Army, should be furloughed to their old jobs.

>Congressional investigations which interrupt, war plant routine, and the multitudinous forms which executives must fill out, should be drastically reduced.

>Labor is being hoarded or badly utilized in many war plants. Cost-plus contracts, which remove the incentive to reduce payrolls, shouldbe ended.

But Baruch insisted once again that these, and all other measures, must be coordinated into an overall, efficiently administered plan. Then he evoked the bogeyman: “The only alternative to some plan of this sort is a national service act for the drafting of labor.”

*Including (see cut) Consolidated Vultce president Harry Woodhead. Aircraft War Production Council Manager Frank F. Russell.