THE ARMY AND INDUSTRIAL MANPOWER. By Byron Fairchild and Jonathan Grossman. (1959, 1970; 291 pages, 3 tables, 2 charts, bibliographical note, glossary, index, CMH Pub 1-8.)

The administration and management of industrial labor, except in the Army's arsenals, were until World War I fields remote from the traditional responsibilities of the Army. In World War II the War Department found itself drawn into these areas to an unprecedented extent, not only by its concern for the output of munitions, but also by its new responsibilities regarding industry in such fields as the maintenance of security in war plants, the enforcement of labor laws and policies, and the administration of facilities forcibly seized by the government to avert stoppage of production by labor-management disputes. The present volume is not intended to be a comprehensive treatise; the aim, instead, is to illustrate by discussion of selected topics the nature of the problems the War Department faced in relation to the employment of industrial manpower and the policies and procedures that it developed to deal with them. This discussion is complementary to two other volumes on the subject of procurement, economic mobilization, and supply--The Army and Economic Mobilization and Buying Aircraft: Materiel Procurement for the Army Air Forces--as well as to the histories of the technical services.

Given the experience of World War I, the concern of the War Department with labor problems as an aspect of its broad responsibilities for procurement was recognized and was the subject of planning in the years between the two world wars. The labor planning and the organizational developments that occurred during World War II are described in Chapters I and II, which provide the background for the rest of the volume. Chapters III through V constitute a discussion of the restrictive factors affecting the use of the civilian labor force that either were anticipated or assumed important during the war. The authors next consider the problem of labor supply, which gained momentum toward the end of 1943, and the efforts of the Army to meet it (Chs. VI through IX). They describe the measures taken to recruit additional workers and the successful special project technique that was developed to deal with labor problems. The subject of Chapter X is the role of the Army as an instrument for enforcing the labor policies of the government. The use of Selective Service and the seizure of industrial facilities by the government as measures of enforcement are described. The volume concludes with a discussion of the attempts to obtain the enactment by Congress of some form of national service legislation (Ch. XI) and with a brief chronological survey (Ch. XII).

Key topics:
1. Labor clauses in procurement contracts.
2. Public opinion and the mobilization of labor.
3. Labor supply factors in contract placements and cutbacks.

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4. The problem of minority groups in war industry.
5. The employment of foreign workers and prisoners of war.
6. The use of soldiers in war industry.
7. Compulsory service in war industry versus voluntary labor.
8. The relation between the strength of the Army and the size of the civilian labor force.