Word: coppers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...labor shortage in the copper mines (TIME, Aug. 3) was so critical last week that the War Labor Board finally went way out of its way to do something about it, promised to consider 37 separate wage-boost pleas forthwith on "an industrywide basis," in order to keep copper miners from drifting away to higher-paid work faster than they can be replaced...
...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...
...downtown Portland last week the sunbeams wriggled through her superstructure, flicked over the letters OREGON. Once she was the bravest battleship in the U.S. Fleet, the heroine and toast of the whole U.S. Now Washington had consigned her to the junk heap, where her 10,300 tons of steel, copper and brass could be turned into fighting metals for World...
...unhappily, both in tonnage and use, these metals, though strategic, are all pipsqueaks compared to the basic scarce ones -steel and copper and zinc. There are still many doubters who swear that the "scarcity" of base metals is an illusion caused by wasteful use and chaotic allocation methods (TIME, Aug. 3). But so long as the U.S. war machine must have more of them than WPB can find, it cannot run at capacity...