What the document says
This volume is the Manhattan District's own history of how it found and managed the people who designed, built and ran its plants. It covers operations as of 31 December 1946 and leaves out the Los Alamos Project, which the volume says is covered in Book VIII. At the peak, the construction, supply, operating and research contractors employed 120,000 people. Workers came from all over the country, hired against other heavily publicized war programs at a time when labor was critically short. Secrecy made the job harder, because no one could tell a recruit what the work was for.
Recruiting ran through the War Manpower Commission, the federal agency that controlled wartime hiring, and the U.S. Employment Service. Paid recruiters followed routes the commission set. Skilled construction workers came mostly through the American Federation of Labor building trades unions, while scientists came through contracts with universities and industry. The volume says the District was the first organization to use manpower priorities, under which the employment service sent an applicant to one named employer before offering any other job. The District held the Number 1 Priority. In June 1943 a shortage of common labor at Clinton Engineer Works put the work in danger of falling behind, and some three hundred laborers were needed at once.
On pay, the District let each contractor keep its usual practices inside the national wage stabilization limits, including the Little Steel formula, which capped increases. Salaries above $9,000 a year needed approval from the Under Secretary of War and a major general. Military staffing grew from an original authorization of 62 officers to a peak of 699, and enlisted authorizations rose from 334 men in 1943 to a total of 6,032. Security also shaped labor relations. Public hearings under the National Labor Relations Act would have exposed classified facts, so the District ran its own grievance procedure and did not open Clinton Engineer Works to union organizing until the spring of 1946.
Key points
- 01At peak employment the construction, supply, operating and research contractors held 120,000 workers, recruited nationwide during a critical labor shortage.
- 02Officer authorizations grew from 62 to a peak of 699, and enlisted authorizations from 334 men in 1943 to a total of 6,032.
- 03By the time the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, over 3600 scientific and technical men had been individually selected and procured.
- 04A complement of 150 Navy officers was assigned early in 1944. The number reached a maximum of 145 by that July and fell to seventeen by 31 December 1945 as civilians replaced them.
- 05Workers who left their jobs while still needed were refused certificates of availability, which technically barred them from other work for sixty days.
- 06An authorization on 12 June 1944 let the District move up to 563 enlisted men into the Enlisted Reserve Corps so they could work as civilians while still under military control.
From the original
Limited housing and transportation facilities on and in the vicinity of the projects added to the difficulties of recruiting and retaining employees.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, OpenNet declassified document archive, OSTI ID 1126629, document number E3752. The summary is written from the document’s own text. Old scans can be hard to read, so check the original for anything you plan to cite.