Labor Supply and Regulation in the United States

Labor Supply and Regulation in the 1st World War

During the 1st. World War, the question of national ” man-power ” came to the front as never before. In a war engaging the whole resources of a nation its man-power must be distributed to meet four paramount obligations: (1) The maintenance at requisite strength of the fighting forces; (2) the supply to the forces of the necessary men for carrying on war; (3) the supply of the necessities of life for the civilian population, and (4) the maintenance of ordinary commercial work to the fullest possible extent in order to maintain financial credit. It is the business of Government to see that as far as possible the appropriate categories of men are drafted into each class. If there is a shortage of the gross supply it becomes a duty not merely to attempt to increase the total from new sources, but to regulate the existing supply in such a way as to increase its productivity.

The problem of ” man-power ” in war-time is obviously different from the outset in countries which begin a war with universal compulsory service and those which begin a war on the basis of voluntaryism. In the case of countries such as France and Germany, the approximate size of the fighting forces was known in advance, and this fact, combined with universal compulsory service, at any rate canalized the problem. In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, where the fighting forces were expanded sevenfold, and where there was no compulsion at the outset and never universal compulsion, the problem was of a completely different order. Because the history of labour supply and regulation in the United Kingdom during the First World War is the history of how a system had to be improvised to meet the ever-shifting demands of their predominant national needs.

See Also

• Convention Concerning Forced Labor
• Theories of Economic Regulation