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for. The Treasury money gets distributed. There are a tremendous amount of things to be done.
So we in the Department of Labor planned to have all things concerning labor within the range of jurisdiction of the Department of Labor. Very shortly after that everybody in the United States was planning separate special board, special arrangements for the mobilization of labor, the handling of labor, and all that kind of thing. There were some fantastic schemes which passed in review through the President's mind. Others were more sensible. Most of them, as I look at it now and did then, could have been done better if they had been kept within the Department of Labor.
At the outbreak of the war the Army and Navy had a large number of civilian workers employed in their arsenals and gun factories. They were under the jurisdiction of the department that hired them. For that reason the Army and Navy both had what they called a Wage Board. They couldn't make union contracts, it being the policy of the government not to make union contracts, but they nevertheless expected to pay these skilled mechanics a union scale of wages. So the Army and Navy had had for years a Wage Board. All the Wage Board really did was to fix the wages for different kinds of civilian work in the Army and Navy. They were guided by the prevailing rate of wages, or the union scale of wages. They didn't really pay the prevailing rate, which is determined by the
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