(2 of 2)
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.