MANPOWER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 February 1943, Page 4

MANPOWER

AMERICA’S POSITION COMPARISON WITH ENEMY. DOMESTIC PROBLEMS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) WASHINGTON, February 23. The United States must have an army of 8,200,000 and a total of 10,800,000 in the armed forces before the end of this year, declared the Under-Secretary of War, Mr Robert P. Patterson. He said that the second figure represented only 84 per cent of the American population, compared with 134 per cent of the German population in the services. Mr Patterson declared: “The enemy superiority in the European theatre is of ominous proportions. The Axis commands more than 13,000,000 men. Similarly, in the Pacific the Japanese outnumber the United Nations by many divisions. For that reason the needs of the armed forces must come first. The domestic manpower problems cannot be solved by shrinking the size of the Army and Navy or granting blanket deferments for special groups. The problems of labour turnover and absenteeism had been solved in Britain, Russia. Germany and Japan, and they must be solved in America, he added. The House of Representatives Naval Committee, approving the principle of “work or fight,” said in a statement today that absenteeism, particularly on Saturdays and Mondays, had created a very ugly situation. Workers in war plants were not on the job long enough, steadily enough, or reliably enough. The committee recommends the transfer of absentees into the armed forces if the situation is not corrected. In 81 commercial shipyards 7.7 to 8 per cent of the man-hours were lost in October as a result of absenteeism. In some yards the absentee rate has reached 14 to 18 per cent, and in one yard it has reached between 20 and 30 per cent.