168-Hour Week

Last week a new potential bottleneck loomed on the defense horizon : 'U. S. businessmen. At the top, where there is no second shift, the pressure was mounting. It was not a uniform pressure; only managers with defense orders felt it seriously, bankers and salesmen still got to the club or the first tee on time. But all over the U. S., high-pressure spots were multiplying. Presidents and general managers canceled trips to Palm Beach, ate lunch and dinner at their desks. Wives fretted. Doctors warned. But still U. S. businessmen came early and left late:

> In Detroit, General Manager Nicholas Dreystadt of Cadillac (now turning out parts for the Allison engine) canceled vacations for defense-order executives, or dered an overworked assistant South for a rest.

> In Baltimore, Glenn L. Martin Co. executives had "forgotten about vacations," worked almost seven days a week.

> In Philadelphia, all SKF Industries top executives are working 60 to 70 hours a week "and we go home with homework."

> In Pittsburgh, President William P. Witherow of Blaw-Knox has given up his usual monthly junkets to Atlantic City, is spending 20% of a longer day as chairman of N. A. M.'s Defense Committee.

> In Atlanta, after working the night be fore until 3 a.m. on blueprints, the general manager of Scripto Manufacturing Co., which has orders for shell fuse-boosters, confided: "My wife and the wives of the other management men are threatening to divorce us because they never see us. If I were ten years younger, I'd enlist as a buck private and let somebody else worry about all this."

> Frederick Coolidge Crawford, president of Thompson Products, missed his annual winter vacation for the first time in ten years, stayed in Cleveland to work 14 hours a day.

> In Palm Beach, many a familiar face was missing. Complained one vacationer: "There were only six people in 'Bradleys' last night."

> In Washington, $1-a-year men set a stiff pace for Government men: William Clayton put in 60 hours, W. Averell Harriman, John Biggers and Bill Knudsen around 80 hours in a six-day week. RFC's lights burned nightly.

More businessmen were under a strain than would admit it. Some thought the admission would sound like complaining, and there was little of that. Out of their long hours, businessmen began to draw new motives. For the first time, profits, quotas, competition half-faded from the executive mind. It was as though U. S. business was embarking on a vast corpo rate merger. Company after company sensed itself becoming a part of something bigger, the nation's defense.

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