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>In Utah and Idaho, WMC recently worked out a voluntary "freezing" arrangement with employers and unions: henceforth no copper, lead or zinc miner can leave his job without permission; to make the agreement stick, the War Labor Board raised wages $1 a day — 25% instead of the 15% formula. Said one mine operator: "This is a perfect case of locking the barn door after the horse is stolen." One-fifth of the miners are already gone.
> In Detroit, the auto industry's new war plants have no shortage yet, expect to lose soon about half the men now deferred by draft boards—just at a time when Michigan factories, newly tooled up, will need 290,000 new workmen by June. The U.S. Employment Service, searching through draft files for skilled workers in civilian-industry jobs, has talked only an "infinitesimal" number into changing to war plants.
The real pinch has not yet come. A year ago there were 51,000,000 employed people in the U.S.
Within a year the armed services will reach 10-13,000,000, the youngest and the best.
War industry will need an estimated 20,000,000.
No one has yet figured out how many millions will be required to supply the nation's basic economic needs for food, clothing and the necessities of life. But probably the U.S. must have about 63,000,000 men & women in the armed forces, war industry and essential civilian jobs by the end of 1043.
M-Day for Manpower is just around the corner. The nation has let experienced farm hands follow the lure of higher wages to the cities, to become rank apprentices at a new trade. It has let draft boards pluck skilled and infinitely precious war workers from industry. It has let the Navy's busy recruiting trucks roam the nation, picking and choosing, skimming off the cream of American manpower with hardly a thought to national policy. Now the month of crisis is at hand.
Manpower. Since April, when President Roosevelt made tall, tan and terrific-Paul Vories McNutt head of WMC, Americans have expected the Manpower Tsar to start ordering them around: to tell businessmen whom they could hire, snatch housewives out of their homes. They did not realize that his title was ersatz, that he has authority to make policy but none to carry it out, that in all Washington there is hardly a man willing to lift a finger to give him that power. He cannot yet give orders to any worker. The nation's 6,500 independent draft boards take men without a thought to WMC. All McNutt can do is persuade Major General Lewis B. Hershey, National Director of Selective Service, to issue directives—which the boards can then blithely ignore.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that McNutt made less noise than any other high Washington official. He spent the last two weeks of August on vacation, returned to his office for one day, promptly took off on a four-day junket for a Labor Day speech in Omaha. He returned to Washington for nine more days, then was off to make a speech at the American Legion convention in Kansas City.