Delicious Circle?

Franklin Roosevelt received last week a report from his National Resources Committee* which made two striking calculations: 1) if the U.S. had given full employment to all its workers (except 2,000,000 considered normally unemployed) the nation would have had $200,000,000,000 more income between 1930 and 1937; 2) this $200,000,000,000 of wasted labor could have supplied a new $6,000 house for every family in the U. S.

The committee used these ugly facts to pose a problem: How can democracy prevent such tragic waste? That fundamental problem is certain to be posed again & again until it is permanently solved. But the report of the committee was badly timed for getting Americans to face their problem now. It came at the very moment when a war boom threatened to abolish unemployment until peace brings the next depression.

U. S. business may well keep its fingers crossed about the real economic profits which a war boom, might offer, but the soundest element of last week's incipient boom was that it had already stimulated employment, thereby increasing purchasing power to support a continuation of bigger production. By reemployment such a boom, even if false, might inaugurate the opposite of the vicious circle of depression: the beginning of a delicious circle of recovery.

Some of the many small straws already blowing in the wind of reemployment and bigger pay rolls, especially in heavy industry areas like Chicago, Pittsburgh:

P:In Chicago's steel mills 1,000 more men were employed last week, employment reached 80,000, already within 2,000 of the post-depression (1937) peak.

P:Railroads, which in recent years have been employing fewer men than even in 1931, began to show signs of rehiring. Pennsylvania put 1,560 to work, Louisville & Nashville 650, Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 200. In the Pittsburgh area alone, 1,800 furloughed employes were recalled to handle steel and coal shipments. B. & 0. recalled 800 men for repairing and building cars & locomotives. Pennsylvania estimated that it would require 4,000 more men to repair freight cars, 2,000,000 man-hours of work on passenger cars, locomotives and new freight cars.

P:The shipyards, already busy (62,000 men in Navy yards and 50,000 in private yards), were invited to bid on about 152,000 tons of new shipping (approximately 1,700,000 man-hours of work are required to build an average 6,400-ton cargo vessel). Bethlehem Steel increased the working hours of 20,000 employes at its Sparrows Point (Maryland) shipbuilding division, at Staten Island planned to hire 2,000 more.

P:How many men the booming aircraft industry (see p. 63) was hiring was anyone's guess, but Glenn L. Martin's Baltimore plant has already taken on 4,000 men in three months.

P:Coal mines in Fayette County, Pa. employed 3,000 men.

P:In Upper Michigan copper and iron mines increased their work week from three to five days.

P:Odd industries had production crises: i.e., Chicago's Rand McNally map makers were busy 24 hours a day and all hands worked overtime. Reason: production in ten days of what would normally be ten years' output, 1,500,000 maps of Europe. Rand McNally's entire stock of European maps was sold out 24 hours after German troops invaded Poland.

* A research clearing house for Executive Departments. Chairman: Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.

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