With the army siphoning so many men from the labor market and with immigration reduced to a trickle, unemployment disappeared and wages rose. Although the cost of living soared, imposing hardships on people with fixed incomes, the boom produced unprecedented opportunities.
Americans, always a mobile people, pulled up their roots in record numbers. Disadvantaged groups, especially African Americans, were particularly attracted by jobs in big-city factories. Early in the conflict, the government began regulating the wages and hours of workers building army camps and manufacturing uniforms. In April 1918 Wilson created the National War Labor Board, headed by former president Taft and Frank P. Walsh, a prominent lawyer, to settle labor disputes. The board considered more than 1,200 cases and prevented many strikes. The War Labor Policies Board, chaired by Felix
Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School, set wages-and-hours standards for each major war industry. Since these were determined in consultation with employers and representatives of labor, they speeded the unionization of workers by compelling management, even in antiunion industries like steel, to deal with labor leaders. Union membership rose by 2.3 million during the war.
However, the wartime emergency roused the public against strikers; some conservatives even demanded that war workers, like soldiers, be conscripted. While he opposed strikes that impeded the war effort, Wilson set great store in preserving the individual worker’s freedom of action. It would be “most unfortunate. . . to relax the laws by which safeguards have been thrown about labor,” he said. “We must accomplish the results we desire by organized effort rather than compulsion.”
World History
