Labor Problems and Labor Admin istration in the United States By GORDON S. WATKINS, PH.D. Assistant Professor of Economics PART II The Development of War Labor Administration CHAPTER V DECENTRALIZED LABOR ADMINISTRATION At the time of its entry into the great war the United States/ did not possess adequate executive, administrative, and judicial machinery for dealing with the numerous labor problems that such an emergency is likely to uncover. Consequently we were forced to learn by the slow method of experience, which at frequent intervals proved costly. The development of our war labor administration constitutes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of our industrial reorganization for war. Characterized during the first year of our active participation in the great struggle by a series of mistaken efforts and a groping in the darkness after some solution for the perplexing and increasingly threatening labor situation, the war labor administration of the United States finally crystallized into a centralized and coördinated system. Differentiated administration, however, was replaced by centralized administration only after the labor situation threatened a complete breakdown of the national! war program. The spread of industrial unrest following our entry into the war revealed the utter inadequacy of existing labor administrative machinery to cope successfully with the problem. This situation was attributed to the fact that the functions of the Department of Labor were limited by statute and incidentally by appropriations; also because each production department of the government assumed the administration of labor conditions arising in connection with its own industrial projects. Labor disputes, dislocation of the labor supply, lack of standardization of wages, inadequate housing and transportation facilities, labor turnover, etc., were commanding attention. The Department of Labor was using its facilities to the utmost, and each of the production departments of the government was attempting to devise its own ways and means of handling its own problems. Thus there was evolved a decentralized labor administration |