Puget Sound Purge

The National Industrial Conference Board this week reported that total U.S. employment at the end of June reached 63,500,000. This was not only a new peak; it was more workers than had previously been thought necessary to meet all military and civilian production goals. Yet the U.S. today is not meeting those goals and lack of manpower is a prime reason for the failure.

The answer to this riddle may be 1) labor hoarding; 2) unrealistically low estimates of actual labor needs; 3) a combination of both. But the acuteness of the manpower shortage itself was underlined once again last week. In the booming Puget Sound, Wash, area, the War Manpower Commission officially ordered ship builders to "take immediate steps to reduce total employment," unofficially asked them to cut their payrolls by about 14,000 (14%) by mid-September. Reason: even Boeing's Flying Fortress production is lagging for lack of some 9,000 workers (TIME, Aug. 2); the Northwest's vital lumber and food processing industries are also gravely understaffed.

Drastic as it sounded, employers were skeptical about how much good WMC's order would do. It did not tell workers where they should go, if & when the shipyards release them. And it did not apply to the Bremerton Navy Yard or to Henry Kaiser's prize operation at Vancouver, Wash. (now busy turning out aircraft carriers), which is outside the Puget Sound area. Since WMC cannot change the hard fact that WLB has allowed shipyard wages to be stabilized at a higher level than most other war wages (including aircraft), the best bet was that most of the workers would try to find jobs with the shipbuilders outside the WMC order.

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