World War II and #COVID19 crisis part 2, with a focus on labor utilization.
Getting the right people with the right skills in the right place and time was the toughest nut to crack on the American home front. Why is this relevant to COVID19? /1
Getting the right people with the right skills in the right place and time was the toughest nut to crack on the American home front. Why is this relevant to COVID19? /1
Like WWII: despite mass lay-offs, we are already seeing spot shortages of specific types of essential workers. (The war conversion also started with mass layoffs.) /2
Much of Governor #Cuomo's speech on 3/24 covered labor utilization strategies: adding people with special skills in health care, nursing, and maintaining temporary hospitals and his demobilization strategy all depend on functioning labor utilization mechanisms. /3
WWII example of what can go wrong: at the start of the crisis (1941-early 1942), employers expanded their workforce by hiring young white men, and then the military drafted their workers. Those with military contracts protested; the military did not care. /4
Today: the virus is the military draft: the virus will take essential workers. How many? For how long? How many won't come back? Example: recruiting retirees gets experienced workers, but is drawing from a high-risk population. This is the challenge of labor utilization. /5
WWII: They used specific tools to move and match workers to jobs. Some of these tools, dear readers, you are not going to like or likely use, but it is helpful to understand how they saw the problem. /6
WWII: The no. 1 concern was productivity: actually getting essential jobs done. Normally, if you are having trouble staffing up, you raise wages or offer perks. But this led to a situation where employers were bidding against each other for scarce essential labor. /7
WWII: They called this "poaching" each other's workers. High turnover hurts productivity, especially if new workers need training. Timing of work-e.g. essential workforce needs six months out-adds complications. (Today example: workforce for mass vaccinations.) /8
WWII: They started with wage controls. This strategy lasted throughout the emergency. The federal government set a ceiling on wages and rules for overtime, etc. Employers could not offer more. Wage controls stabilized labor allowing other tools to work (sort of). /9
WWII: They repurposed the depression-era United States Employment Service offices in states and metro areas. Recruitment, prioritized for essential workers, ran through them. Or was supposed to. /10
WWII: With wage controls and coordinated recruitment in place, leaders worked on monitoring emerging shortages and responded by managing the need for essential workers, metro region by metro region, job category by job category, putting out crisis after crisis. /11
WWII: When wage controls and coordinated recruitment weren't enough, they attempted stricter methods. Limit quitting by requiring workers in essential jobs to receive a "release" from their current employer to get another essential job? This didn't really work. /12
Today: We've already seen the Governors competing for critical goods. Now just imagine competition for essential workers. Maybe even hoarding. /13
Today: God forbid that we actually lose significant percentages of essential workers (police, fire, transportation, logistics, etc. in addition to health care), for months or forever, to the virus, because the solutions are really hard to implement, let alone quickly. /14
Today: Success requires careful monitoring of emerging labor dynamics and then close coordination by federal, state, and local officials and employers. This would be true for Cuomo's demobilization plan too. /15
P.S. for hard-core history folks. Two fun facts: WWII workforce management was unnecessarily difficult because the military wanted a labor draft and was willing to stress out the home front to try and get it. /16
P.S. con't: Home front managers eventually settled on a strategy that rationed white males, but allowed freely hiring white women and people of color. Yes, some of the labor shortages were actually a refusal to hire willing workers. /end
