Behind the Bulkhead

A wind whipped across Newark Bay, whistled through the skeleton structures of ways and unfinished steel ships. Inside one of the vast, gaping hulls, on the sunny side of a bulkhead, was a warm, temporarily peaceful spot. A man in a blue workshirt took a quick look around, grunted, eased himself down. Thousands of other men were riveting, welding, working in other parts of the great yard. For half an hour or so he would not be missed. He snoozed.

Up & down the East, West, Gulf coasts, this scene was repeated. No strikes held up the job, but workers loafed, "lost themselves behind the bulkheads," as though the most critical and frightening need of the whole war program last week was not for ships, ships, ships.

Other workers simply played hooky. In Maine, officials reported that every day from 10% to 15% of the employes at the South Portland yards failed to show up. Some of them took two or three days off to work their farms. Some stayed home to fish. Some just stayed home.

In Washington, Rear Admiral Emory Scott Land, tsar of shipping, himself under fire, appeared with solemn-faced Rear Admiral Howard L. Vickery, Maritime Commissioner in charge of ship construction, before a Congressional investigating committee to make a fuming complaint. Workers were patriotic, he said.

If they were sure that the money would not go back to management, they would even give up certain financial gains. The program lagged because the productive spirit lagged. That was not all. Said Jerry Land: "It's the infernal agitation that's going around in everybody's head whether it is closed shop or open shop, whether there will be wage increases or no wage increases." He had one solution: "A definite labor policy."

On the West Coast, where Admiral Land said the spirit was actually high compared to the East, one shipyard worker charged: "The attitude of most of the men is to do as little work as they can for as much money as they can get." Writing in The Log, Pacific Coast maritime magazine, the worker told of meeting a fellow employe who said he had not really done any work for four months.

The attitude was typical, said the writer. "It comes from the system. . . . Money seems to be the least of anyone's worries--just like water coming out of a hydrant. The more errors, the more delays, the more overtime, the more profit, the more wages--the more for everybody except the Navy."

The workmen, he said, were not the only ones to blame. Bosses were frequently careless, often untrained, often just as laggard as the men. "Some bosses in order to look busy like to get their names on a lot of orders and will order out equipment that won't be needed for three or four months. It gets kicked around, damaged and some of it even is swept up by the yardman and lost."

Honest workers, said the writer, finally shrugged and gave up. "After batting their heads against a stone wall for several months, they decided they could do nothing about it and might as well ride the gravy train like everybody else. . . . I really want to work, but I can tell you if I get a chance to turn out more than an hour's honest production work on a shift, I'm doing well."

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