The 24-Hour Day

"Our problem," the President told OPM's Knudsen-Hillman last week, "is to see to it that there is no idle critical machine in the United States. The goal should be to work these machines 24 hours a day and seven days a week."

Spurring Mr. Roosevelt's attack on industry's weekend and night-shift blackout were many a fact & figure on equipment which could produce far more. Examples from machine-tool plant reports which are in the hands of Washington defensemen:

> Only 20 of the 67 included in the report were operating three shifts; 43 were on two shifts; four were still on a single shift.

>Even plants on more than one shift usually had most of their workers on the first, frequently used the others just to enable one department to catch up with another. In the 67 plants there were 33,236 workers on the first shift, 10,541 on the second, only 3,035 on the third.

> Defense assistants concluded that only 20% of machine-tool plants approximated full employment, that the 67 plants could add 40% more workers (upping employment from 46,812 to 65,162) if two-or three-shift operation were used to maximum advantage.

Under the defense program the machine-tool industry, famous at the start as the No. 1 bottleneck, has expanded production from $200,000,000 in 1939 to $450,000,000 last year, an estimated $750,000,000 this year. If this industry was still far from round-the-clock operations, other industries likely were still farther. Soon after the President's statement, the National Association of Manufacturers, which has surveyed 18,000 previously unstudied manufacturing plants, reported that the 434,159 machines in these plants were idle an average of 14 hours a day.

Said President Roosevelt: "I have watched the steady . . . growth of the machine-tool industry during the past months. ... I have seen the critical machines in our defense plants used in an ever-growing number of hours each week. . . . But it is not enough." His plan:

1) to pool, on paper, all possible defense tools in plants both large and small; 2) to take defense orders to all these machines, or move the machines to factories busy on defense; 3) to provide skilled workmen and stepped-up schedules which would keep the machines busy as many hours as possible out of the week's 168.

The President said he hoped that enough labor could be found to avoid increasing individual working hours. But many an employer was less optimistic. In the machine-tool industry, more than 95% of employes have been working overtime: an average of 12 1/2 hours a week. Since no employer would pay out that much overtime if he could help it, this was a sure sign that the long-expected labor bottleneck was now a potent fact. Immediately after the President's statement, Knudsen-Hillman asked industry workmen to substitute bonuses for vacations in defense plants this summer. Draft headquarters disclosed that the classification of skilled workmen would be re-examined and that some men already in the Army might be transferred to factories.

The "24-hour, seven-day week," while it made good headline material, is an impossible goal. No machine can operate continuously without maintenance and repairs, and few manufacturing industries can come close to the 168-hour ideal. But on any sort of three-shift basis, the Administration believes, the U.S. can get far more production out of its machinery than it gets now.

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