Word: brewsters
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...plant for Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co., to turn out an order for some 800 stainless-steel Army & Navy cargo planes. With only four planes built, the Services cancelled their contracts for all but 25. WPB talked of new make-work contracts for Budd, the WPB solution to the Brewster shutdown (TIME, June 12). As Budd began to lay off 2,000 workers, contracts were in the offing to convert the plane plants to shell making. But mass production is five months away...
Finally, after a weekend of wrangling, U.A.W.'s burly, curly-haired Vice President Richard Frankensteen had good news for the workers: Franklin Roosevelt agreed they had been given too short dismissal notice, and had promised to see that Brewster got consideration on any available new contracts...
...Brewster's Thousands. But this was a postponement, not a solution. Even Brewster workers knew that cutbacks-and shutdowns-were inevitable. Brewster's contract had been canceled because the Navy no longer needed so many Corsairs, and because the Navy considers Brewster, harried by bad management and long strangled in one of the most rigid labor-union contracts in the U.S., the least efficient producer. (The Navy said Corsairs cost $72,000 at Brewster; $63,000 at Chance-Vought, and $57,000 at Goodyear, for identical planes...
...trouble lay in the abrupt, muddleheaded way the cutback had been ordered -without due notice. Henry Kaiser, in his seven months at Brewster, had laid off 7,000 men, and not even the union had protested. But the Administration had stepped in unprepared, and fumbled its first big cutback crisis. Now it had to resort to make-work, tiding over the dismissed employes until July 1, to give them "adequate" dismissal notice. The Government could put Brewster to making spare parts for other Corsair producers -but this would be highly inefficient: their manufacturing techniques differed. Was the Administration...
...Navy's Own Way. Who was to blame? The Navy had botched the job. The Navy had confidently told WPB that it was giving the workers six weeks' notice. But stopping delivery of completed planes (at Brewster's assembly plant in Johnsville, Pa.) six weeks hence had meant the prompt shutdown of Brewster in Long Island City, which makes sub-assembly parts far in advance. The Navy, doing things its own way, had not troubled to find out how Brewster operated, before moving in on the kill. And Franklin Roosevelt's two high-powered agencies...