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Show MJ rTW OPEW PEARSON aiu'iirmiii..riimlllUliin Washington. D. C. WAGE STABILIZATION You can write it down that the President will use his executive powers to keep wages in check rather than ask congress for any new legislation dealing with wage stablization. There are two reasons for this: (1) Wage control legislation would be sure to stir up another bitter congressional controversy, as bad or worse than the brawl over farm parity prices. It might even require re-quire months to get both houses to agree on a bill satisfactory to the administration. (2) The President believes that the policy proposed by the War Labor board's recent steel wage decision-limiting decision-limiting wage increases to 15 per cent over scales prevailing on January Janu-ary 1, 1941 plus additional rationing ration-ing of consumer goods, will be sufficient suf-ficient for the time being to brake inflation threats to the working man's pocketbook. Inside fact is that the War Labor i board is contemplating only one further fur-ther step in its wage stabilization program, and this is not so much an anti-inflation move as a conces- sion to certain labor groups and a contribution to the prosecution of the war. Wages in certain industries, including in-cluding shipyards and tool-and-die plants, are above the 15 per cent increase in-crease ceiling set by the board. This raises the question shall wages In these industries be brought down to conform with scales in other war plants which pay below the ceiling? The answer is there will be no reduction in wages. The President has decided definitely ngainst this. Instead, to prevent piracy and migration mi-gration of workers away from vital war plants paying below the 15 per cent ceiling, the War Labor board is planning to amend its wage policy to permit the payment of "premium "premi-um wages" (above the ceiling) in such plants. Note: One Industry sure to be allowed al-lowed "premium wages" is aircraft, which has lost many workmen, by piracy and migration, to higher-paying shipyards. NEW ARMY FOOD To save shipping space, the army is sending food overseas in dehydrated dehy-drated form. Experiments in taste-preserving taste-preserving dehydration have been carried out and tested on a group of army cooks. At the Chicago depot of the quartermaster quar-termaster corps, the cooks sat down to a meal of dehydrated foods, principal prin-cipal item on the menu being scram bled eggs made by adding water to a yellow powder. It has been discovered that one pound of dehydrated turnips will serve 28 persons, after water is added. BEHIND THE AIR CORPS This war will be won or lost in the air. But despite that fact the air forces will win or lose the war on the ground. In other words, the success of operations in the air depends de-pends on ground crews, who outnumber out-number air crews ten to one. Featured in the headlines and the newsreels every day arc the pilots and machine gunners. But the unsung un-sung heroes of this war are the ground crews. Real fact is that it takes only one man to pilot a fighter plane, but it takes eight or ten maintenance men to keep it in shape to fight. A four-engine four-engine bomber requires a flying crew of nine, and a maintenance crew ot 25. Often a ground crew will be assigned exclusively to one plane, and will become attached to it with the affection a stable boy has, for a race horse. Chief of Staff General Marshall has revealed that the over-all strength of the air force Is expected to reach 1,000,000 men by the end of 1942. and 2.000,000 by the end of next year. If the war is won In 1943, it will be won by these 2.000,000 men. But 1,800.000 or them will be "fighting" "fight-ing" on the ground. They are the overall-boys, the grease monkeys, the men who spend all day overhauling an engine which has been flying all night, the men who know what heat is like in the deserts of Africa, because they don't get up in the air for relief, as do the pilots. OVERSEAS CANDY The quartermaster corps is In the market to buy 2,500,000 pounds of hard candy: peppermint, orange, lemon, lime, anise, and cherry The hard candy is being boupht for overseas troops, as part of the regular field ration. Odirial explanation expla-nation is that randy is an excellent source of energy. . AFRICAN CAMEL CREWS They are the mechanics, the armorers, ar-morers, the metal workers, the welders yes, and they are the pick and shovel men who build the landing land-ing fields In foreign postf, and repair re-pair them after enemy bnmbeti have passed over. They re also the cooks and the mess boys, the pay masters, the doctors, and the truck drivers. In short, they are the men who perform every duty i that keeps a plane In the air. They do everything except replace the African camels. |