MANPOWER: The Buffalo Plan

A year ago Buffalo could have matched its manpower troubles with any city’s.It had an overall labor shortage, which was worsened by widespread labor pirating, sucking workers from the heavy work and low pay of the steel mills, shipyards, etc., into the pleasanter surroundings and high wages of the aircraftplants. As a result, war production in Buffalo’s heavy industries was hamstrung, while overstaffed aircraft plants frequently marked time for lack of parts from understaffed subcontractors. To ease the crisis, Buffalo fumbled with numerous catch-as-catch-can makeshifts. Example: to induce more women to take war jobs, a cozy Cape Cod cottage was built in downtown Buffalo to give them a cozy place in which to sign up. But the cozy touch failed. Quick, tough action was needed.

The Rosenberg Plan. Action came in the person of small (5 ft 3 in.) explosive Anna Rosenberg, New York’s WMC director. Budapest-born Mrs. Rosenberg settled her first labor trouble when she was 17 and students in two Manhattan high schools struck against military training. She has been busily settling strikes and untangling labor muddles ever since.

Imbued with a desire to be a “small, pale crusader” against greed and selfishness, she landed a job in 1934 with the crusading NRA, soon bossed it in New York. To settle labor disputes, the biggest part of her job, she developed a technique of mowing down disputants with a machine-gun delivery of tough, sensible talk, backed up with hair-trigger thinking and many a trick learned in Tammany politics. Sample: while temporarily serving as assistant WPA director for New York, she was hemmed in in her office one day by a “lie-down” strike of dissatisfied employes. She promptly phoned a hospital, reported that a number of people had fainted, asked for ambulances to cart them away. The strikers hastily left.

As a labor expert, she was ‘collecting $28,500 annually in fees from private clients by 1942 while drawing a salary of $7,500 as New York Social Security Director (TIME, May 18, 1942). Despite the outraged cries of Congressmen, she went right on collecting for her public & private advice on labor. But when she took over the WMC job, she dropped private advising, concentrated on a solution for Buffalo’s manpower muddle. The solution: the Buffalo, or “controlled referral” plan.

The Buffalo Plan. The plan was simple. It did with labor what WPB had long done with materials. Labor priorities were set up through a WMC Labor Priorities Committee for all plants in the Buffalo area. This committee, through the United States Employment Service, by two methods funneled all available men into plants where they were most needed: 1) unemployed men could get jobs only by going to plants designated by USES; 2) those with jobs could shift only with permission of their employers or WMC. Many an employer with a low labor priority balked. Organized labor promptly branded it “labor servitude,” objecting because workers could no longer shop around for higher paying jobs.

Talking down or ignoring the objections, Mrs. Rosenberg ordered the plan into effect last June. The results: heavy industries are now getting the workers they need, are back on production schedules. Airplane plants, which are usually on a cost-plus basis and thus might as well hoard labor, since Uncle Sam pays the bill, learned to get along with fewer workers, and to utilize them better. Neither management nor labor likes the Buffalo plan in principle. Both still writhe under its straitjacketing. But few will not admit that the plan has worked.

The West Coast Plan. Last week Home Front Czar Jimmy Byrnes clamped the Buffalo plan — with modifications —onto five West Coast areas: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Portland. There the manpower shortage has forced a slow scaling down of U.S. plane production goals, and threatens to knock them on the head in 1944 — despite occasional optimistic WPB estimates.

The shortage is needlessly complicated by having labor and production balanced by two committees, one run by WPB, one by WMC. But Byrnes, following recommendations by Bernard Baruch (see p. 19), gave them a potent weapon lacking in Buffalo—authority to cancel less essential contracts, if necessary, to create a labor pool and thus funnel the workers into the top priority industry—aircraft.