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"On this Board were representatives of the War, Navy, and Agriculture Departments, the Shipping Board and the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the War Industries Board, and the Food, Fuel, and Railroad Administrations. Assistant Director Nathan A. Smyth, of the United States Employment Service, was quoted in the New York Globe as saying in part:

"'Today the war industries of the country are short about 500,000 unskilled workers, and the coming requirements of war production necessitate finding between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 more.

"'Similarly the demand for skilled workers in war industries is greater than the immediately available supply. Before long we will have to take every tool maker and die-sinker in non-war work and put him in war production.'

"The country was divided into thirteen Federal districts, by the regulation of labor for war industries, and each was in charge of a superintendent of the United States Employment Service, while the States within the several districts were in charge of a State director. The labor problem this measure was designed to remedy and control was pictured by Secretary of Labor Wilson, who was quoted in the New York Sun as saying in part:

"'The Government found itself in need of men, and on going out to get them found itself in competition with private industry, which was equally hard pressed. Men who had never drawn more than a common laborer's wages found themselves at a premium in the market, and began to ask and receive extortionate prices, and to rove from place to place seeking still higher prices.

"'Everywhere industry was hampered by what is known as the turnover, or the constant shifting of itinerant labor, in some cases the loss in efficiency running as high as 100 per cent. This is what is perhaps best described as the evil of the individualistic strike—the strike by the man, thousands of him, in different yards and factories all over the country, who is forever throwing down his tools and wandering away on the slightest rumor of higher wages elsewhere, who by his habit of roving never masters the details of any trade, and who in the mass accounts for a greater loss than all the organized strikes and walkouts in the land.'"

INFLUENCE OF WAR CONDITIONS

In the United States under war conditions labor unrest did not reach the intense form manifested in England. Nevertheless a great many strikes were reported. Surprise was expressed that the labor adjustment machinery of the War Department and of the Navy Department was not appealed to. Besides there was the National War Labor Board to take up mediation. Investigations in Bridgeport, Connecticut, showed an increase of earnings of 81 per cent. against an increase of living prices of 61 per cent. Yet at one time the Press reported strikes in over 350 machine shops in New Jersey—nearly all engaged in necessary war work—as well as trouble in many shipyards. Of course there was the explanation of foreign propaganda or a tendency toward industrial Bolshevism. Such explanations failed to account for the fact that American workmen as a whole were patriotic.