MANPOWER: The Last Bottleneck

The manpower shortage — the last, most punishing shortage operating against U.S.

war production — is now apparently just another busted bottleneck. This big news was the meaning of many little items of seemingly unrelated news last week.

The Stages. The U.S. war effort went convulsively through these stages: blueprints, tooling up, materials shortages, manpower shortages. At the start there were not enough good plans in any detailed blueprint form for war production. Then came the tooling-up phase, when the U.S.

had to make the tools with which to build the machines which would make the war material. This was the OPM phase. In the next stage (SPAB and WPB) the great new plants quickly ran the stockpiles down into shortages, and new plants and machinery had to be built to meet these shortages. This terrific expansion, in turn (in conjunction with the draft), used up all the U.S. manpower.

By spring of this year the manpower shortage was everywhere: a half-dozen Congressional committees were howling, the War Manpower Commission listed 36 acute labor areas, Franklin D. Roosevelt called on his top drawer—Messrs. Byrnes, Leahy, Baruch, Hopkins and Rosenman—for an answer to the new problem. There came out long tables of nondeferrable occupations, threats about “work-or-fight,” 48-hour-week ukases.

By last September Boeing Aircraft’s Flying Fortress production was lagging badly for lack of 9,000 workers. That was the payoff: Army, Navy, WPB, WMC, industry, labor et al. publicly and simultaneously converged on the manpower bottleneck. They all worked on the “West Coast” for job priorities and allocation.

By October, Boeing had at least temporarily a surplus of workers, and aircraft production as a whole was up 10% from September, all war production up 5%.

Behind the Headlines. That was how the story emerged in the headlines. The dry, unread manpower statistics are just as dramatic: last winter, when the shortage talk had barely begun, was the all-time peak employment period for nonagricultural labor; ever since then the trend has been down (see chart).

But how could the manpower crisis be cured now, with almost 2,000,000 less non-farm workers than when it was first discovered? Certainly no one gave any credit to Paul McNutt’s much denounced War Manpower Commission. The little-noticed change actually came from the slow combination of the efforts of many men—and the progress of the war itself.

Main factors: WPB had learned about bottlenecks the hard way, from earlier struggles with plants and materials. WPB’s Vice Chairman Charles E. Wilson personally intervened in the manpower mess, personally toured some of the bad spots, personally supervised emergency measures to heal them.

WPB persuaded the Army & Navy to do what they said when they said they would cancel new orders, however urgent, in labor-short areas. West Coast industry began believing when the slow-moving Navy pulled a big contract out of West Coast shipyards last month.

Businessmen learned how to cut corners as the first flood of war orders turned into a steady stream of mass-produced weapons. They began to concentrate on cutting costs when Congress, the Truman Committee, and Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch demanded the end of cost-plus fixed fee contracts, and the beginning of fixed-price deals where waste is red ink, savings are profits.

“Peace jitters,” fostered by victories in every war theater, reinforced the pressure on management to economize on labor, not to hoard it. So did contract cancellations dictated by changing military strategy. Instead of storing up men for the next stratospheric, damn-the-cost contract, American industry began to wonder a little about the high cost of severance pay on D-D ay.

No Reason to Relax. The good news about manpower might turn into bad news again—if it is misunderstood. The fact is that, as far as the eye can see, the busted bottleneck is still barely wide enough for war and essential civilian needs.

Last week, for example, new cutbacks and closings of small arms plants hit the headlines all across the East and Midwest.

The closings meant layoffs to more than 30,000 workers by year-end. *Everybody from the local chambers of commerce to WMC in Washington was actually happy, because the men & women were needed at once for other essential jobs right on the spot.

In New York City—long a “surplus” area for both plant capacity and manpower—Y.M.C.A. workers rang Harlem doorbells last week looking for new labor for New Jersey war. plants. In Lake Charles, La., a brand-new high-octane plant appealed to the Governor for 1,000 more men; in Washington D.C., Petroleum Industry War Council Chairman William R. Boyd spoke darkly of “a creeping manpower crisis” in his industry. Unemployment throughout the U.S. was down to a minuscule 700,000, lower than anyone had ever thought it could go.

It was still not time to relax. But the isolated cries of “crisis” had an unmistakably out-of-date ring.

— The cutbacks: Des Moines, Kings Mills (Ohio), St. Louis, Independence (Mo.), Crab Orchard (111.), Denver; the closings: Marion (Ohio), Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Lowell (Mass.).