"Not Present

"Absenteeism is merely a fancy word for a very plain, very stark, very ugly situation. The workers in our plants . . . are not on the job long enough, steady enough, reliably enough, and as a consequence, we are not doing a good enough job to win this war."

Representative Lyndon Baines Johnson, dark, trim Texas New Dealer, last week reported simply to the House on a complex problem--baffling every war agency. Since the war, absenteeism had doubled, tripled in many war plants.

From the House Naval Committee Lyndon Johnson rushed a "work or fight" bill. His plan: i) let every Navy Yard report worker absences to its local draft board; 2) let every board decide whether the employe should work or fight; 3) if the plan works in shipyards, extend it to every other war industry.

The Senate's Truman Committee sought firsthand facts. They were meager. One truth emerged: Government shared with both management and labor responsibility for a tragic wartime manpower seepage; legislators could not place the blame at labor's door alone.

Half a dozen independent studies traced job absences to causes more complex than simple malingering or hangovers. Poor housing, overcrowded transportation, fatigue caused by long hours were given equal weight with labor hoarding, inadequate supervision, bad scheduling of work, failure to obtain materials in advance.

To a plethora of possible solutions, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt contributed another. Her suggestion: send foremen and small groups of workers to the fighting fronts; let them bring back eyewitness accounts to their fellow workers. While the roll of "not present" at war posts grew steadily longer, OWI, WMC and five other war agencies conducted overlapping studies of the cause and cure.

Said the Washington Post: "The disturbing fact is that the Government has winked at the waste of manpower in both its own agencies and private industry for so long that its appeals for more work sometimes fail to make a serious impression on workingmen."

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