OPM Flops Again

To its long record of muddling without muddling through, the Office of Production Management added a finally inglorious chapter last week. OPM sat down with management and labor to bring about the thing the U.S. needs most: immediate conversion of its automobile industry, greatest productive machine in the world, to all-out arms production. Little was accomplished.

The task should have been easy. All 200 men at the meeting--auto executives, labor leaders, OPM and other defense chiefs--had the same goal. Without conversion to munitions the auto industry was finished, because there was no more rubber for its peacetime cars to roll on. Without conversion the union was a union of unemployed. And without conversion the Government would have trouble getting all the materiel that it needs to beat the Axis.

Nevertheless, the job was not done.

Planless Plan. The meeting began hopefully at 10 o'clock one morning. As the delegates sat down around OPM's long walnut conference table, a sense of urgency filled the room. From the side walls blazed posters: TIME IS SHORT; UNITED WE STAND. From the far end of the long room, a new portrait of Winston Churchill gazed down, stern and steadfast.

OPM's carnation-pink William Knudsen made one of his simple we-can-do-the-job speeches, punctuated by the sees with which he likes to end sentences. OPM announced that it wanted the industry to double its scheduled 1942 arms output to $5,000,000,000, that it would set up a joint management-labor board to speed conversion. The Army & Navy announced that they had $5,000,000,000 worth of orders for the industry to take over immediately.

So far so good. Said Chrysler's Vice President B. Edwin Hutchinson, as the morning drew to a close: "We'll go back and break our necks to do the job."

Returning from lunch, the delegates found Bill Knudsen poring over the Army & Navy's $5,000,000,000 shopping list. He began abruptly:

"We want to know where some of these things will flow from. We want to know if you can make them or want to try to make them. If you can't, do you know anyone who can?"

He went down the list item by item: "We want more machine guns. Who wants to make machine guns? . . . We need a great many [turbine blades]. . . . Somebody ought to be able to forge these things."

Bill Knudsen got some of the orders accepted--but by no means all. Even after six months of gradually decreasing automobile quotas, long months when it was clear that conversion must come, OPM still had no plan for conversion, still did not know who could or would make what. The best Bill Knudsen could do at this late date was try to auction off the orders, hit or miss.

As the afternoon wore on the motor-makers began to sweat: they had thrown their overcoats on a window ledge, accidentally covered up a ventilating outlet. As the delegates melted in the heat, the nation's hope for immediate conversion melted too.

Capital v. Labor. When the management-labor committee met next day, the conference hit another impasse. The five industrialists and the five labor leaders were separated by a jungle of ideological differences, of mutual suspicion and distrust.

Before the conference, both sides had carried their disputes into paid newspaper advertisements full of bitter words. C.I.O. had blamed management for clinging to business-as-usual, delaying conversion, creating unemployment for 400,000 workers when automobile production stops at the end of this month.

The Automobile Manufacturers Association had answered: "The men who led the original sitdown strikes, who tolerated and encouraged not scores but hundreds of sitdowns, slowdowns and other forms of production sabotage, now propose that they are the capable ones to guide . . . production for war." The issue was clear: the union wanted power to help control production policies; to management, the idea of giving the union such power was anathema.

The union insisted that the management-labor board have real power to demand and supervise conversion, force pooling of facilities, place contracts on an industrial-wide basis. Management wanted the committee to have only advisory power--with final decisions to rest in management's hands.

All day the bickering went on. The storm center was bumptious young Walter P. Reuther, who devised labor's 1940 Reuther Plan for pooling industry facilities for airplane production. The management men admitted that Reuther had great ability,* hinted that they would be glad to welcome him as an individual into management's ranks. But they did not want him running the show as a union leader.

After dinner the committee split into armed camps. The industrialists went off with Knudsen. The labor men went off with OPM's Sidney Hillman. For two hours they passed notes back & forth, then adjourned for the night to let tempers cool.

Next day the note-passing continued. Finally Knudsen and Hillman worked out a wishy-washy compromise which settled nothing. The big committee was disbanded. In its place was formed a subcommittee of three management and three labor men, with towering, pipe-smoking Cyrus Ching, industrial-relations director of United States Rubber Co. and a member of the old National Defense Mediation Board, as neutral chairman. To this group 0PM gave power to "assist" in conversion.

"Assist" was an OPM weasel word which seemed to mean less than supervise and more than advise. What it actually meant, if anything, nobody knew.

Delay, Confusion. Despite OPM's failure, the auto industry would be converted somehow. Management, labor, the whole U.S. were determined on that. But no one could say how much time had been lost by last week's indecision and wrangling.

Said Pundit Walter Lippmann: "[Management and labor] find the procurement agencies unready. They find the OPM without a plan. What is more, they find no one with authority who knows what he wants and means to get it. ...

"The immediate and inevitable result of this lack of authority in the Government has been a dismal quarrel between the manufacturers and the C.I.O. This quarrel has exploded because in fact the Government, as represented by the weak voices of Mr. Knudsen and Mr. Hillman and the procurement agencies, was standing by trying to umpire when its duty was to plan and command. . . .

"If there has been any lingering doubt in the president's mind, no doubt can now remain that his Administration is badly organized and inadequately manned to carry out the war program. . . ."

* So did the Army, which sent Reuther and Lieut. Colonel A. Robert Ginsburgh on a survey of auto-plant facilities.

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