The time had come last week for the Administration to take resolute action on both the manpower and inflation fronts. The Army's steady and inexorable drain on the nation's manpower was now fully apparent (see p. 59). Labor, particularly in the person of John L. Lewis, was getting set to blow the Little Steel formula sky high with demands for bigger wages. Yet U.S. labor was working on the average of only 44 hours a week in all U.S. industry—an appalling waste of manpower in a nation at war.
To try to meet both problems at once, the Administration, as so often in the past, chose a single sideways maneuver. Without any warning, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the national work week upped from 40 to 48 hours — with overtime for the extra eight. Ostensibly, the order was designed to free manpower (some estimates ran as high as 1,000,000 men) for the Army and war jobs by 1) making it unnecessary for war industries to hire more workers; 2) forcing consumer industries to fire employes no longer needed under a longer work week. The order reversed the peacetime Government labor formula of spreading the work and hiring as many as possible, instituted instead a wartime edict of hiring few and dispensing with as many as possible.
But the move was not as simple as that, and it affected other things besides the manpower muddle.
Industry Wonders. At the last minute, Franklin Roosevelt decided against entrusting the new policy to the War Labor Board or Fanny Perkins' Department of Labor, handed the odious job of enforcement to War Manpower Commissioner Paul V. McNutt. Unprepared for the backbreaking job, Paul McNutt was by no means ready with all the answers. Swiftly he moved to make the new rule apply to 32 critical labor-shortage areas, later included 102 others.
Then the questions began to pour in:
Did the order apply to every industry and business in the designated areas? It did, except those employing eight or less.
What were consumer and service industries to do if they could not pay the additional overtime and make a profit under price ceilings? They were either to get along with a smaller staff working longer hours or—although the Government did not bluntly say so—fold up. Paul McNutt indicated that necessary exemptions would be made.
Were war industries, most of which are already on the actual 48-hour week, to fire unnecessary men immediately? No one is to be fired under the order before March 31; after that, WMC will pass on all firing problems.
Critics of the 40-hour week at first hailed the move as a bold and badly needed stroke. Later they had some reservations: 1) for all except war industries, the order virtually removed the profit incentive from business; 2) its enforcement posed tremendous difficulties.
Labor Approves. Organized labor, in the persons of William Green and the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther, unreservedly approved; the plan was strikingly similar to a proposal made a month ago by Mr. Reuther (TIME, Feb. 1). But what would organized labor say when the firings began?