Tire Trouble

The motor-transportation crisis, long foreseen, has arrived. But the crisis comes not from a shortage of rubber, but of workers and equipment with which to produce heavy-duty tires.

One by one, hundreds of the nation's essential trucks and busses are limping into garages--their heavy tires worn out, and no new ones available. From the great distances of the Southwest, one bus operator reported last week that from 25 to 50% of his equipment will be tied up within 30 to 60 days. Another trucker expects one-third of his units to be off the road by August 15. With new tires scarce, Michigan truckers sarcastically call their OPA tire-purchase certificates "hunting licenses." Nationally, the American Trucking Association says "day by day scores of trucks are going up on jacks."

At a "Tires for Victory Rally" in Akron, Rubber Director Bradley Dewey urged "every worker whose output helps to build a heavy-duty or airplane tire to make his final sprint." The synthetic production program has succeeded, he said, and "our production capacity is now so great that we have been able to lend some synthetic rubber manufacturing facilities to provide extra quantities of high-octane gasoline. . . ." Then he pointed his finger at the present bottleneck: the lack of manpower and equipment in making heavy-duty tires.

This week the WPB Requirements Committee was meeting again. The problem: how to get 100,000 tires a month for civilian trucks and busses during the third quarter. These 100,000 tires will probably be a maximum allocation, or less than the 25% of total production civilians were allotted for the second quarter.

All workers who could be shifted from making passenger-car tires have been transferred to heavy-tire production. All convertible equipment has likewise been transferred.

The only real answer is greater production. The original 1944 goal was 17,500,000 heavy tires for civilian and military uses; thus far, production had averaged about 1,200,000 tires a month. To boost production, Rubber Boss Dewey got the Army to release fully trained tire workers over 30, and stepped up the pace of the $75,000,000 equipment-expansion program.

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