The First Cutback Crisis

Some 8,500 men & women reported to work as usual at Brewster Aeronautical Corp.'s Long Island factories--and discovered that 4,500 had been fired that day. The sudden shock of this news stirred angry questions to which all U.S. labor wanted an answer: Was this to be the pattern of cutbacks and reconversion? Where were Washington's well-laid (or at least well-trumpeted) plans for painless transition to peacetime production?

Brewster employes dramatically forced an answer. At the urging of their union (C.I.O. United Auto Workers), all but 200 of the day shift stayed at work, even after the night shift came on. Since there was too little work for two crews, some workers played ping-pong and shuffleboard, danced to the music of piano, brass and drum. The union sent in enough sandwiches, pies, doughnuts, coffee and soda pop for a five-day siege. Some of the stay-ins crowded out on the balconies, hanging signs: "We've Got the Tools. We've got the Ability ... but We Ain't Got the Work." Below, women pickets carried placards: "Is This What My Husband Is Fighting For?" The union proudly proclaimed the first striker-to-work in U.S. history.

The moral effectiveness of this queer carnival was somewhat marred by the fact that the workers were not being thrown on the streets, without relief. Anna Rosenberg, the War Manpower Commission's slick, chic regional director, had 11,000 other jobs in the New York area awaiting the dismissed employes. But only about 725 workers signed up. Sometimes the new jobs offered less pay than Brewster's $1.14 an hour top for unskilled workers; sometimes the new jobs were inconvenient to get to. But mostly, workers hated to lose their seniority; some had worked for Brewster since 1933.

Finally, after a weekend of wrangling, U.A.W.'s burly, curly-haired Vice President Richard Frankensteen had good news for the workers: Franklin Roosevelt agreed they had been given too short dismissal notice, and had promised to see that Brewster got consideration on any available new contracts.

Brewster's Thousands. But this was a postponement, not a solution. Even Brewster workers knew that cutbacks--and shutdowns--were inevitable. Brewster's contract had been canceled because the Navy no longer needed so many Corsairs, and because the Navy considers Brewster, harried by bad management and long strangled in one of the most rigid labor-union contracts in the U.S., the least efficient producer. (The Navy said Corsairs cost $72,000 at Brewster; $63,000 at Chance-Vought, and $57,000 at Goodyear, for identical planes.)

The trouble lay in the abrupt, muddleheaded way the cutback had been ordered --without due notice. Henry Kaiser, in his seven months at Brewster, had laid off 7,000 men, and not even the union had protested. But the Administration had stepped in unprepared, and fumbled its first big cutback crisis. Now it had to resort to make-work, tiding over the dismissed employes until July 1, to give them "adequate" dismissal notice. The Government could put Brewster to making spare parts for other Corsair producers --but this would be highly inefficient: their manufacturing techniques differed. Was the Administration's answer to cutbacks a kind of wartime WPA, to keep plants going that were uneconomic to operate--at a time when the War Manpower Commission is crying for workers in more crucial industries?

The Navy's Own Way. Who was to blame? The Navy had botched the job. The Navy had confidently told WPB that it was giving the workers six weeks' notice. But stopping delivery of completed planes (at Brewster's assembly plant in Johnsville, Pa.) six weeks hence had meant the prompt shutdown of Brewster in Long Island City, which makes sub-assembly parts far in advance. The Navy, doing things its own way, had not troubled to find out how Brewster operated, before moving in on the kill. And Franklin Roosevelt's two high-powered agencies to handle reconversion (in WPB and OWM) had been asleep when the violence was done.

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