Word: opm
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Dates: during 1941-1941
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...union security" (by which a company agrees to nurture, sometimes encourage, union membership). In only one instance has it recommended a closed shop: the Bethlehem Shipbuilding case. Its justification: the other 38 shipbuilding firms on the West Coast had already agreed to the closed shop provision of an OPM master contract. In every instance, except one, industrialist members of the panel sitting on the case were in full accord. The exception: Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock...
Trouble with OPM's priorities administration was that it never expected real shortages. 0PM handed out so many priority ratings that they lost all meaning. Manufacturers, under no compulsion to accept orders accompanied by priority ratings, were loathe to turn down such tried-&-true customers as the automobile industry for new defense customers...
This encouraged inventory hoarding, which 0PM did little to stop. Only last month did OPM undertake its own surveys of defense metal inventories. These surveys, which will be speeded up by SPAB, will establish for the first time whether materials are really short or only hidden. Two big hoarding suspects: Army and Navy, to which OPM always granted priority ratings as a matter of course. SPAB will apply the yardstick of immediate needs to Army and Navy orders the same as any other...
...Geddes expects his industry to be 75% occupied with defense. In the meantime, its good-soldierliness had caused OPM and OPACS to give it enough materials to keep going while the changeover takes place. The manufacturers were reconciled to making only 2,500,000 sets for the civilian market next year (v. 11,600,000 in 1940). They began "upgrading" sets in quality and price, to cut down demand, increase longevity (and unit profits...
Last week a bomb dropped on this comparative industrial paradise. OPM still remained, precariously, in the "no squawks" category, but OPACS was now, according to one radio bigwig, "a bunch of goddam, nitwitted, half-baked college graduates." Reason: a new civilian allocation order for plastics raw materials (induced by an OPM priorities order on formaldehyde, other chemicals, and their synthetic resins). The order eliminated their use for radio cabinets, 40% of which are now made of plastics...