Word: coppered
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...Washington agrees that copper is one war industry whose wages (87.5? an hour) are too low to compete successfully for labor. Half a dozen agencies have plans to do something about it. The War Manpower Commission is talking about giving copper miners extra special draft deferment; and last week there was new and stronger talk of closing U.S. gold mines and diverting their workers to base metals...
...output of mines that produce nothing but gold (like Homestake and Natomas and Golden Cycle) just gets buried in the ground again, but it requires the labor of more than 7,000 miners, while copper production lags for lack of only 5,000 men. Hitch in this logical suggestion is that there is still no way to make sure that the disemployed gold miners would stop off at Butte instead of drifting on to West Coast shipyards. Nor is there as yet any national service law to stiffen the spine of Paul McNutt's War Manpower Commission...
Thus wages are the simplest and almost the only practicable way of solving the copper crisis now. If copper wages are raised much OPA will have to do some new figuring on copper prices, for at 12? a Ib. the big companies are already producing some 30% of their copper at a loss (on the OPA theory that they can afford to average the loss out against their lower cost output). Even a 10?-an-hour raise would cost $7,000,000 a year-small pickings compared with the $250,000,000 the Government is paying for domestic copper...
...long last is ready to put the profit motive to work to get the big copper companies to increase their output of this bottleneck metal...
When OPA and Metals Reserve Co. offered a 5? premium over and above the 12? ceiling for increased copper production last winter they deliberately set the base quota on which no premium will be paid so high that they not only froze out the big three (Anaconda, Kennecott and Phelps Dodge, which produce 85% of U.S. copper) but also froze out all but one of the other 15 companies which with the big three produce 98½% of U.S. total...