The BNY in the Inter-War Era                                                           BNY Labor History

The Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Hoover Administration, 1929 - 1933
Introduction
New York City and the Great Depression
The Brooklyn Navy Yard Looks for Work
Non-Construction Work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard
Early Government and Navy Responses to the Depression
    a. Wages
    b. Hours
    c. Pensions
    d. The “Balanced Shop”
1932 - A Policy Formal and Otherwise Develops
    e. Employment Stabilization
    f. The Emergency Relief and Construction Act
    g. The Economy Act
    h. The Navy Department Finds Ways To Meet Its Personnel Needs
    i. Rotation of Work
The Navy Responds to its Critics
Conclusion
    Chart: BNY Civilian Employment Figures: 31 December 1928 - 31 December 1932

Introduction
“Navy Yards and Naval Stations are essential for the maintenance and operation of the Fleet and exist solely for that purpose.”  So said Secretary of the Navy Charles F. Adams in written testimony he gave to the House Committee on Expenditures on Executive Departments in January 1932.  While this brief, simple, and oft-asserted comment appeared self-obvious in the 1920s, opponents of unemployment were quick to challenge it with the onset of the Depression. [Letter, Adams, to Chairman, Committee on Expenditures on Executive Departments 28 January 1932; RG181; NA-NY.]

Navy yards were industrial endeavors of the first order, their continued functioning relying on the efforts of tens of thousands of civilian men--and, during wartime, women--to build, maintain, overhaul, convert, and repair the country's warships.  Working outdoors on the building ways and inside the shops, these people riveted and welded steel plates to frames, wired electrical systems, built boilers, turbines, shafts, and propellers, and installed massive cannons.  Navy yards also required the labor of thousands of men and women to draw up blueprints, pay salaries, process job orders, and organize and file the reams of correspondence that were every bit as necessary in building a warship as the wood-, steel-, and copper-manipulating skills of the trades workers.  These were good jobs, with better wages than non-unionized workers, and, in this era, with benefits superior to almost all workers.  Workers in the navy yards naturally wanted to maintain and improve their jobs, and they and their advocates expected the Navy and the federal government to continue to support their relative good fortune in return for their labors.  [For a list of duties of the major trades in the navy yard, click here. For a general review of the shipbuilding business see the articles in: Fassett, ed., The Shipbuilding Business in the United States of America, 2 vols. (New York: Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 1948). For a history of shipbuilding from about 1865 to 1929, see Heinrich, Ships for the Seven Seas: Philadelphia Shipbuilding in the Age of Industrial Capitalism  (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). There are many books on the craft of shipbuilding in this era. Some technical ones are: Hovgaard, Structural Design of Warships, (Annapolis: the U.S. Naval Institute, 1940); Edgar Smith, A Short History of Naval and Marine Engineering (Cambridge: The University Press, 1938); Manning and Schumacher, Principles of Warship Construction and Damage Control (Annapolis: U.S. Naval  Institute, 1935); Manning, Manual of Ship Construction (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., inc., 1942); Viall, Electric Welding (New York: McGraw-Hill Book co., 1921). A large number of books on individual trades were published in the early 1940s as training manuals. See: Coen, Ship Welding Handbook (New York: Cornell Maritime Press, 1943); Niederhoff, Blueprint Reading for the Shipbuilding Trades (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1943); Swanson, Modern Shipfitter’s Handbook (New York: Cornell Maritime Press, 1941); Haliday and Swanson, Ship Repair and Alteration (New York: Cornell Maritime Press, 1942). There are a few memoirs of interest in this area. For the era from 1900 to 1940, see Evans, One Man's Fight for a Better Navy (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1940). From about World War I through the end of World War II, see Bowen, Ships, Machinery, and Mossbanks: The Autobiography of a Naval Engineer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). On the history of American shipbuilding before World War II, see Hirshfeld, “Rosie Also Welded: Women and Technology in Shipbuilding During World War II (Ph.d. diss., U. of California, Irvine, 1987); Palmer, “Organizing the Shhipyards: Unionization at New York Ship, Federal Ship, and Fore River, 1898-1945 (Ph.d. diss, Brandeis University, 1990).]

In March 1929 Herbert Hoover entered office as president and with him came Charles F. Adams as Secretary of the Navy and Ernest Lee Jahncke as Assistant Secretary.  The new administration continued the moderate naval policy of its Republican predecessors.  As the Secretary put it, the Department sought to administer "the Navy with such economy as is consistent with maintenance of efficiency as a unit of national defense.”  The Depression only increased the government's desire for thriftiness.  The Navy made budgetary cuts in all areas; it reduced the number of ships in full commission, the size of their crews, and the force of enlisted men and Marines in general.  Ship captains were ordered to plan their maintenance carefully and to help save money given more discretion than previously in allowing their enlisted men to perform the routine maintainance work on their ships that navy yards might ordinarily do.  According to the Chief of Naval Operations, by mid-1932 “the cost of operation and maintenance of the forces afloat ha[d] been cut to the lowest point consistent with national security.” [Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report, 1930; Annual Report, 1932; Chief of Naval Operation, Annual Report, 1932.]

Having to run his department on the cheap did not please the Secretary.  In his Annual Report for 1931 Adams cautioned that while he and his staff understood the need to be parsimonious, that it was the view of many of his best officers that the Department needed appropriations “reasonably” in excess of those currently being received in order for the navy to expand to its treaty limits.  He did respect the fact that the Navy was subordinate to the will of Congress and the President, but as a Cabinet member Adams felt he had to alert the government to what should be obvious, that the United States was neglecting its fleet, and leave the implications of that to the reader. [Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1931.]

The growing misery brought on by the Depression exacerbated labor relations in the navy yards, as the needs of serving the fleet, whose size and condition was determined by political factors, conflicted with the need to maintain naval civilian employment as an end in itself.  The two presidents of the Depression, Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt undertook two quite different strategies to mediate or to resolve this tension.  These two approaches reflected different attitudes as to foreign relations, the national economy, and the intricate relationship between these two elements that manifested themselves in defense spending.  This section focuses on the policies of the first of the presidents: Herbert Hoover.  During the years of his administration workers wanted secure jobs, the government wanted economy and a minimal naval commitment, and the navy wanted to continue production according to its own methods as best it could.  [There is, of course, another connection of naval shipbuilding to the national economy: the very complex and mutually-reinforcing relationship between the navy and its suppliers of material and its commercial shipbuilding contractors.  For the most part, except as it impacts on the employment relationship. For the beginning of this relationship, see Cooling, Gray Steel and Blue Water Navy: The Formative Years of America's Military-Industrial Complex, 1881-1917 (Hamden, CT: Aarchon Books, 1979).]
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New York City and the Great Depression
The Great Depression fell on New York City with a vengence.  The New York State Department of Labor reported that based on an index that set the average of the years 1925-27 as 100 that by June 1930 employment in New York City had fallen to 82, and then to 70 by June 1931; during these same months payrolls had slipped to 84 and 67 respectively.  Near the end of 1932 the indices for employment and payroll had descended still further, to 62 and 52.  The manufacturing sector peaked in November 1929, employing 156,925 people, with weekly average wages of $32.32; by the beginning of the fourth depression winter in New York City manufacturing employed only 116,197 people, a loss of 26%, at an average weekly payroll of $25.69, a loss of 20.5%. [These numbers are found in: The Industrial Bulletin, issued by the Industrial Commissioner of New York State, January 1930; July 1931; November 1932.]

The federal census announced that in April 1930 80,621 Brooklynites were unemployed and looking for work while another 13,919 were on leave without pay from their jobs.  In late January 1931 a police census informed the city it had jobless 67,552 heads of households.  By the beginning of LaGuardia's first term as mayor, in January 1934, more than 400,000 families received some type of relief and the rolls were being added to at the rate of 15,000 per month.  Approximately twenty-three per cent of the population was estimated to be on relief, the highest of any major American city. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 January 1931; 28 January 1931; Heckscher, with Robinson, When LaGuardia Was Mayor: New York's Legendary Years (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978).]  These figures give us some idea as to why so many New Yorkers felt it so important that the government maintain employment in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the early years of the depression.

New Yorkers could not look to the federal government for assistance.  Even as late as eighteen months into the Depression Hoover still maintained that government-sponsored relief actually harmed the spirit of self-help that was a foundation of America's culture and that private organizations such as the Red Cross could and should carry the burden of relieving hunger and cold. [See the report of a speech of Hoover's on this subject in: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 March 1931.]  Federal employment fell in these years.  The Navy's civilian field service decreased from 48,615 in 1929 to 45,692 by 1930 and remained just under 46,000 for the rest of Hoover's term.  In fiscal year 1929, the Civil Service Commission reported that federal departments had hired 47,913 new people.  By the end of fiscal year 1933, four months into Roosevelt's administration, the number of original appointments had dropped to 10,403. [U.S. Civil Service Commission, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1933.]

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The Brooklyn Navy Yard Looks for Work
President Hoover was not averse to using existing government funds to augment existing public works programs as a way to help relieve unemployment, and in mid-November 1929, he asked Adams to investigate as to whether the various Bureaus could expand or speed up their activities during the upcoming winter months.  The answers were not reassuring.  The Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks saw few options without additional funding and the Chiefs of Construction and Engineering reported back similarly.  The Ordnance Bureau listed some three million dollars worth of products that it could order, but its Chief also reminded the Secretary that the delay in the start of the 1929-cruiser program had already thrown one thousand men out of work at the Washington Naval Gun Factory.  The decade-old budgetary constraints did not allow the Department much room economically in helping to alleviate the Depression's first winter for American workers.  Nor did the government conceive of using shipbuilding as an economic stimulus.  The February 1929 act had authorized fifteen new cruisers, five to be started that year (one of which was the New Orleans, assigned to Brooklyn) and five more in each of the succeeding two years.  But by the end of Hoover's administration just three of the ships had received funding, the last only in January 1933. [Letter, Hoover, to Adams, 18 November 1929. The replies, addressed to the Secretary of the Navy, from the Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks; the Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair; the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance Bureau; and the Chief of the Bureau of Engineering, are all dated 20 November; RG80; NA-DC. On Hoover and his public-spending policies see: Fausold, The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985); Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). On the cruiser production see: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10 February 1929; 13 February 1929; Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report, for Fiscal Year 1933.]

For the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the beginning of the Depression coincided with two events in such a way that by the summer of 1930 the Yard had been stripped of one-quarter the force it had a year earlier.  In April 1929 the Yard launched the cruiser Pensacola, and although it would not be completed and commissioned until February 1930, with its leaving the building ways the demand for construction labor in the Yard fell substantially.  As there was no other major project assigned to the Yard, management began letting its ship assemblers go.  The employment situation could have been mitigated in part by construction work on the cruiser New Orleans, allocated to the Yard in July 1929 and for which under normal circumstances, after plans were drafted and material ordered, would have had its keel laid approximately a year hence.  But in that same July Hoover attempted to jump start disarmament talks with Great Britain by announcing a suspension of preliminary construction work on the 1929-authorized cruiser building program, a holiday that lasted until May 1930.  Then, per the new London treaty, the 1929-cruisers were redesigned.  They lost one gun, dropping from ten to nine, which allowed for alterations to be made to the design of their armor and propulsion machinery and, so further delayed the commencement of construction.  The keel of the New Orleans was not put down until March 1931, almost two years after the Pensacola left the ways. [New York Times, 26 April 1929; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 May 1929. On the history of American cruiser construction, see Friedman, U.S. Cruisers: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984).]

Lacking a union contract but protected by civil service law, BNY workers grieved their situation by releasing press statements and lobbying their Congressional representatives.  In the year following the Crash, they and their local allies besieged the Navy Department, Congress, and the president with pleas for work to be assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, setting a pattern for the following three years.  In November 1929, Yard labor leaders approached Senators Wagner and Copeland on the issue of employment stability, and Representative Black, along with the borough president and the president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, petitioned Adams for more work to be assigned to the Yard.  Wagner lobbied Adams personally, but to little result as the Secretary claimed there was nothing available to replace the Pensacola.  Wagner then moved up the ladder to speak with Hoover directly, reminding him of his exhortation to private industry in the immediate aftermath of the stock market's fall to maintain wages and jobs.  Hoover and Adams then promised to keep employment levels as high as they could through the holiday season by scrounging up what work could be found, but immediately afterwards Adams gave up and the navy yard's rolls entered a free-fall, dropping from 3821 in June 1929, to 3003 a year later. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 November 1929; New York Times, 26 November 1929; 30 November 1931; BDE, 29 November 1929; NYT, 1 December 1929; 2 December 1929; BDE, 2 December 1929; 12 December 1929; 19 December 1929; 9 January 1931.  It needs to be stressed that lobbyists for the private shipbuilding industry government also appealed for work and Congress had to balance the demands of these two opposing interests.  That Congress continually assigned ships by law to navy yards despite their higher wage costs infuriated the commercial ship building and repair companies no end.  For example, see New York Times, 23 September 1932; 25 September 1932.  Most east-coast private ship yards were non-union at the start of the 1930s, their unions broken in the post-World War I depression.  See; Palmer, “Organizing the Shipyards: Unionization at New York Ship, Federal Ship, and Fore River, 1898-1945,”  Ph.D diss., Brandeis University, 1990.]

In May 1930, Thomas Mahoney, the secretary of the Brooklyn Metal Trades Council, the federation of Yard unions, requested local business and civic leaders to petition Washington for work, and in the following month AFL president William Green sat down with Hoover to press labor's case that all the navy yards be assigned more to do.  As the year progressed the tone of complaints harshened.  In November, Mahoney publicly criticized the navy for authorizing sailors over the previous few months to do basic ship-maintenance work he claimed belonged to yard workers.  The most Adams could say to the constant hectoring was that it was unfair for New York to protest, as the situation at Boston and Portsmouth was even worse.  (A little over a year later, Adams even ventured, to no avail, to propose closing down these two yards, as well as the one in Charleston.)  But the Department did find its way to assign a small, 250-ton barge to the BNY after Congress passed a modest half-million dollar appropriation bill in December 1930, which provided work for 550 people in five navy yards. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 May 1930; New York Times, 10 June 1930; BDE, 4 October 1930; Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1930, 37; BDE, 16 November 1930; NYT, 4 May 1932; 16 December 1930. Black, Charlestown Navy Yard, 1890-1973, 2 vols. (Boston: Boston National Historical Park, National Parl Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1988).]

By the start of 1931 borough anger at the administration had clearly set in.  After the Yard announced another 400 upcoming layoffs the Brooklyn Daily Eagle accused the navy of being “callously indifferent,” saying that even the “very meanest intelligence” knew that unemployment evils were “gravest” in large cities.  Four days later, with a desperate chauvinism, the editorial page stated that as the navy yard was in the nation's largest city it “should have had attention first of all in allotting work.  It is here that relief is most needed; it is here that the maintenance of Navy Yard personnel is most important to national defense.” [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 2 January 1931; 6 January 1931.]

Political persuasion had its rewards.  In February 1929, over some opposition, Congress had attached the Dallinger Amendment to that year's naval authorization bill.  It stated that the first and then every other cruiser would be constructed in a government yard, thereby curtailing a bidding contest between the private and public yards and guaranteeing the latter work.  Passage of Dallinger was heavily supported by organized labor and they fought hard for it as it meant a large number of jobs for their members who worked in the navy yards.  After the bill's passage, Commandant Rear Admiral de Steiguer let the Department know that the BNY was more than capable of taking on one of the ships, if not two, and the BMTC lobbied local businesses to push for New York to get two, claiming that a major ship was worth $10 million to the local economy.  The Yard was awarded the New Orleans in July 1929.  The Dallinger clause would form the basis for major ship contracts up into the war years.  [New York Times, 8 February 1929; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10 February 1929; file copy, “Announcement by International Association of Machinists, N.A. Alifas, President, District #44, to Local Lodges, District Lodges, and Business Agents of the I. A. of M.,”  22 March 1928; RG80; NA-DC;  Letter, Commandant, toSecretary of the Navy, 19 February 1929; RG181; NA-NY; NYT, 11 February 1929.]

In late February 1931, Congress authorized eleven new destroyers with the provision that navy yards should perform as much of the building as they were capable of doing.  But the appropriation process was another matter.  The vessels remained ships on paper until September 1932 when Adams finally convinced Hoover to transfer funds from the navy's allotment in the ERCA (Hoover's belated attempt of a public works agency) to pay to start building the three destroyers.  Two of the vessels (Hull and Dale) were awarded to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but it would not be until March 1933 and February 1934 that their keels would be laid, too late for the Hoover administration to reap the political rewards.  (They would be the only destroyers the Yard, famed for building the largest of warships, would ever build, though three other slightly larger vessels, two Coast Guard cutters and a gunboat would be built shortly thereafter.) [The BNY also built several dozen subchasers in WWI.  Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 February 1931; New York Times, 14 May 1931; Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1933; Levine, “The Politics of American Naval Rearmament, 1930-1938” (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972).]

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Non-Construction Work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard
Navy yards did more than just build warships, and these other tasks helped pull the Brooklyn Navy Yard through until work could begin in earnest on the New Orleans.  The Yard had already received a small boon in July 1929 when the Navy decided that, as the three 1929-cruisers assigned to navy yards (New York, Philadelphia, Puget Sound) had essentially the same design, in the interest of efficiency it would consolidate the functions of drafting plans and preparing material requisitions into one Central Drafting Office (CDO), to be located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The office was set up as an independent establishment under the direct authority of the Commandant and it provided jobs for the drafters who had worked on the Pensacola.  Just before the Depression broke some 225 extra positions had been created, and the work of drafting plans and requistions continued through the building holiday. [Letter, Bureaus of Construction and Repair, and Engineering, to Commandant, Navy Yard, New York, 23 July 1929; Letter, Commandant, to the ASN(NYD), 27 August 1929; Letter, Commandant, to the ASN (NYD), 8 September 1929.  All in RG181; NA-NY. West, “Short History of the New York Navy Yard.”]

In the last fiscal year [1 July 1928 - 30 June 1929] before the Depression, in addition to work on the Pensacola, the BNY performed overhaul work on 48 vessels for a total of 1749 work-days [the number of days each individual project took].  By the summer of 1930 the total of work-days fell to 1533.  By the following year, in part by taking on new types of ships to work on, the total of overhaul work-days rose to 1796.  Ships made periodic visits to the Yard and usually each time they came there was some maintenance problem that required the labor of the Yard's force.  For example, the Yard worked on the Wyoming in April 1930, and the Texas sailed in twice in 1930, for minor repairs and an overhaul.  The Yard repaired storm damage to the Colorado and Salt Lake City in June 1930 and January 1931 respectively, and the latter, along with the Pensacola, were found to have design flaws in their sterns, which were corrected in November 1930.  Even commercial vessels paid visits to the Yard's dry docks for routine work.

Inside the shops, workers kept busy manufacturing and repairing ship components, such as the diesel engines and accompanying spare parts for the navy’s submarines.  In addition, shops picked up jobs where they could find them.  In these years the Electrical Shop fabricated battle telephone switchboards for seven cruisers and all the destroyers then in commission.  An order for 85,000 mattress covers kept the Sail Loft busy.  The Yard conserved some of its drafting and shipfitting crew by having them design and build a lighter and a seaplane wrecking derrick, mostly as experiments in producing all-welded vessels.  There was one major disappointment for the BNY; it never received any of the contracts for modernizing the World War I-era battleships; the navy gave these to other navy yards.  But the BNY did manage to acquire a small piece of the battleship rebuilding program by securing for its Ordnance Shop the manufacturing of parts of the fire control system for seven of the big ships. [“Annual Report of Matters under the Cognizance of the Navy Yard Division,” Commandant, to ASN(NYD), for Fiscal Years 1929; 1930; 1931; 1932; 1933;  RG181; NA-NY.  On the named ships, see: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 April 1930; New York Times, 10 May 1930; BDE, 4 November 1930; 5 June 1930; 8 January 1931; 21 November 1930.  On the battleship modernization program, see: Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1931; BDE, 5 December 1930; NYT, 15 January 1931; 5 May 1931.] [For BNY work in fiscal years 1929-1931.]

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Early Government and Navy Responses to the Depression
For the first three years of Hoover's administration its approach to national unemployment was mostly unplanned and ad hoc.  It was not until near the end of 1931 that Hoover and Congress began to develop a coherent policy for the government's intervention in the economy, in which the navy yards would have a part, and in either case government policy never included massive spending or, in the navy's case, even building up to the number of warships the country was permitted under the disarmament treaties.  But for the navy yard worker the government and the Navy Department's early responses, effected before the Depression's severity could be comprehended, proved more beneficial for those who were able to keep their jobs, with one major exception--the introduction of the “balanced-shop” concept, than some of the well-planned policies of Hoover's final year.

a. Wages
Wages rose in great leaps during the first world war, fell sharply in the years immediately after, and then settled in for a modest rise during the remainder of the 1920s.  Taking one trade as an example, the boilermakers emerged from the postwar depression earning 73¢ per hour and received steady raises until they earned 90¢ per hour in 1926 and 92¢ per hour by the end of 1928 ($44.16 for a 48-hour week, minus the 3.5% pension deduction).  This was the maximum rate, at which most boilermakers worked.  The intermediate rate was five cents an hour less and the minimum rate ten cents less.  From May 1923 to December 1926, Leadingmen and Quartermen received 15¢ per hour and 30¢ per hour respectively over the maximum rate.  In 1927 the difference was increased to 18 and 36 cents. [For the rates of some other trades.]

For those who remained at work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Hoover years the job was a blessing in terms of pay.  As usual, in the summer of 1929 the Yard convened its annual wage board to recommend a schedule for 1930 for Groups I-IVa.  The recommended schedule, with comments from the Commandant, was forwarded to the Department for final disposition.  Before this could occur, the stock market crashed and Hoover called for businesses not to lower their wages in response.  Knowing however that earnings were already falling and fearing he might be obligated to conform in kind if he adhered to the prevailing clause of the wage law, Secretary Adams took a different course.  Citing the public interest clause of the law he announced in November that the Department would continue the 1929 schedule for 1930.  Navy yard workers and their unions disagreed with the decision but there was not much anyone could do given the circumstances. [On the history of the navy yard wage boards, see Spero, Government as Employer. The wage board proceedings are covered in a thick set of files in the local files in RG181; NA-NY. For a summary of the wage board process in these years.  Letter, Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 15 June 1929; Letter, Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 27 November 1929; RG181; NA-NY.]

Wage Boards did not meet again until 1940.  The Navy Department renewed the 1929 wage schedule for the next four years, and in 1934 Congress legislated the 1929 wages as a mimimum wage, below which any wage boards, if called, could not decrease.  Given the trend in wages for most all other workers in the country the “public interest” clause of the wage law for once served to discriminate in favor of navy yard workers instead of its customary use to justify their wages being kept lower than those of unionized workers.  One navy file memo noted that in 1932 the average hourly wage of per diems in the navy yards was 24.95 cents per hour, or 44.5%, higher than for the same ratings in private plants in their vicinity, a fact that continually angered non-unionized, commercial shipbuilders in search of work. [File Memo, “Comparison of Wages of Per Diem Employees, U.S. Navy vs. Commercial Firms,” n.a., n.d. (at least the end of 1932); RG80; NA-DC. For the history of white-collar, IVb wages in these years.]

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b. Hours
Navy Yard workers received another break, when in March 1931 in an act that the Comptroller-General admitted was “primarily for the benefit of employees,” Congress established the paid Saturday half-holiday year-round for the civil service as a means of spreading work. [Up to then, it was only implemented during the summer.]  For yard workers, being paid 48 hours for 44 worked, in effect gave a mechanic earning 92¢ per hour an unofficial 8¢ per hour raise.  In October 1930 the AFL had called for, among other items, the shortening of working hours and its leadership now praised the legislation.  If there was a downside, it was a continued prohibition against working overtime (that is, more than 44 hours in one week) in all but the most immediate of situations.  With advance permission Yarders could work more than four hours on Saturday but all such time worked had to compensated for by taking off other hours by the following Friday.  From the large number of form requests in the files it appears that as long as the work was fairly reasonable, or of a preventive nature, or to make up for office work lost for religious holidays, that such permission was not difficult to obtain.  For weather-related problems permission was pro forma. [Letter, Acting Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 9 March 1931. The quoted part is from a decision of the Comptroller-General of 7 March 1931, copied in: Letter, ASN, to AN&MCAC, 28 April 1931. Both in: RG181; NA-NY. New York Times, 16 October 1930; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 January 1931.  The basic extra-hours policy is outlined in: Memo, Shop Superintendent, Machinery Division, to All Machinery Division Masters,  4 January 1932; RG181; NA-NY.]
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c. Pensions
In May 1930 Congress liberalized the Retirement Act [for government workers] so that it became easier for federal employees to leave the service for what was called at the time superannuation.  The new law raised the maximum yearly limit on annuities from $1000 to $1200 and lowered the retirement age for the mechanical trades from 65 to 62 and for most of the IVbs, from 68 to 65; anyone with thirty years of service was now allowed to retire at 60.  Those unfortunate enough to have incurred a service-related disability had their pensions vested at five years instead of the usual fifteen.  For those wishing to work beyond retirement age, the law allowed under very stringent circumstances for an extension of service from four to six years.  But almost perversely in the view of many, the Civil Service Commission ruled on 1 March, in expectation of the law's enactment, that the government could now hire only people capable of being vested.  The Commission justified its proscribing of the hiring of older people in the name of efficiency.  For the navy yards, who hired people right up to retirement age if they were able-bodied, this ruling established a maximum hiring age limit of 48 for blue-collars and 50 for the IVbs.  The decree brought condemnation from the public. [United States Civil Service Commission, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1930, for a summary of the law and its defense of age limits; Letter, Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 30 June 1930; RG181; NA-NY. On the age limits, see: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 4 March 1930; editorial, 7 March 1930; 9 March 1930; New York Times, 5 March 1930.]
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d. The “Balanced Shop”
As the Depression worsened it soon became clear to the Navy Department that continuing the 1929 wage schedule was a political necessity.  However, in reviewing the employment figures for the navy yards Secretary Adams noticed a large variation in the proportion of the three trade and helper grades relative to one another.  Some yards, like Brooklyn, had few Grade III workers in the intermediate and minimum classes.  In August 1930, the Secretary sent a letter to the navy yards informing them of this fact and that in the Department's opinion there was work “properly to be done by these two grades.”  In view of this and "the necessity to conserve the appropriations, it is desired that steps be taken, gradually, to secure more nearly balanced forces." [Letter, Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 19 August 1930; RG181; NA-NY.]

Over the course of the 1930s the Brooklyn Navy Yard did slowly increase the proportion of second- and third-class positions in each grade to order to achieve “balanced shops” and in the process achieve some savings, but at the cost of great labor discontent. [In the Boston Navy Yard it was an open secret that workers with low efficiency ratings were kept on for budgetary reasons. Black, Charlestown Navy Yard. For more on this.]

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1932 - A Policy Formal and Otherwise Develops
By the beginning of Hoover's last year in office it had become painfully obvious even to him that it would require more than moral suasion and minor spending measures to cure the country's economic woes, and the assumption of Democratic control over the House after the 1930 elections helped push the White House into action.  For the navy yards, three major policy changes were enacted in that last year, that affected them directly: the Employment Stabilization directive; the Emergency Construction and Repair Act; and the Economy Act.  In addition, another, informal “policy” emerged as to civil service regulations and laws when they appeared inadequate in coping with the employment situation: simply ignoring or circumventing them.  All told, these new policies were not necessarily favorable to the interests of navy yard workers--the Economy Act was positively regressive--but they were instituted to contend with the now-recognized enormity of the Depression.
e. Employment Stabilization
By late 1931, with the cruiser program now under belated way, the navy yards began to recover some of their employment losses from the previous year.  At Brooklyn the IVb force prospered, but even with work on the New Orleans having commenced, the rolls of the Group IIIs remained erratic, the total number of discharges that year equaling some 45% of its average force.  Assured of major projects for the yards Assistant Secretary Jahncke announced a new directive on 30 December, employment stabilization, that would keep the work force in the yards as “stable . . . as nearly as may be.”  To accomplish this, the Department established a “basic force” and a “maximum force” for each yard.  The basic force was the minimum number of civilian workers the Department pledged to keep employed “when practicable,” and the maximum force was, accordingly, what its label said, a ceiling to the number of civilian workers a navy yard could hire, and it could not to be exceeded without Departmental approval, and then only for a specific period of time.  So that the directive would not be responsible for throwing people out of work it allowed a grace period for navy yards employing over their assigned limits to trim down.
Navy Yard “Employment Stabilization” Figures
Navy Yard Basic Force Maximum Force
Portsmouth 1500 1800
Boston 1500 1800
New York 3000 3600
Philadelphia 3000 3600
Norfolk 3000 3600
Charleston   500   600
Mare Island 3000 3600
Puget Sound 2600 3120
The Department established these figures by examining the lowest force employed at each yard in the previous five years and then using that number as a “point of aim” in planning the assignment of work and funds.  The directive ensured that the Department remained within its budgetary restrictions, that assigned yard work would be spread out to some extent, and that local yards would be able to resist pressures to hire larger forces in response to public pressure. [Letter, ASN, Ernest Lee Jahncke, to all Commandants, 30 Dec 1931.  The letter is copied in a memo from the BNY Commandant, to The Construction Officer, et al., 4 January 1932 (Note: letter is incorrectly dated 1931); RG181; NA-NY. In the Boston Navy Yard, management manipulated efficiency ratings to drop down to its prescribed limit. Black, Charlestown Navy Yard.]

For the BNY this directive came at something of a fluke time.  It was then employing its largest force in years, 4154 people, substantially over its assigned limit, most of this due to the cruiser Salt Lake City being in port for overhauling.  The situation partly resolved itself in February 1932 when the ship left port and some 400 workers were let go, but this still left the Yard over its limit by about 100 positions, for which the Commandant was called to account by the Assistant Secretary.  The Manager pleaded that the Yard should be allowed leeway because its employment rolls included the CDO despite it supposedly being an independent organization, and that he could only lose the extra hundred by taking them off the New Orleans, thereby delaying production.  Jahncke disagreed and the two men argued the point through a series of letters, but the ASN appears to have backed down as by mid-April the correspondence stops with the commandant having the last word.  It would not be until after passage of the Economy Act at the end of June 1932 that the Yard's force fell within its prescribed limits. [New York Times, 5 February 1932. The Department sent letters to the Commandant on 5 April, 12 April, 13 April, and 18 April 1932; The Commandant wrote back on 11 April, 14 April, and 23 April 1932.  All in: RG181; NA-NY.]

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f. The Emergency Relief and Construction Act
In July 1932, Congress passed the country's first major-relief legislation, the Emergency Relief and Construction Act.  It created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which released funds for public works projects across the country.  The Brooklyn Navy Yard received an allotment of $880,000, marked for specific projects such as $215,000 for repairs and the maintenance of roofs, waterfront quays and docks, and the Yard's railroad system.  The biggest chunk, $475,000, was designated for a major overhaul of the Power Plant, to put in a new turbo generator, piping, boilers, and other engines.  The Act was designed to be a temporary means of providing employment and all the positions created in the navy yard to service the projects were therefore classified as temporary. In another preview of New Deal spending, the government even authorized ERCA funds to start building a number of destroyers in the navy yards. [Warren, Herbert Hoover; Fausold, Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover;  Memorandum for file, P.B. Dungan, 18 November 1932; “Annual Report of matters under the cognizance of the Navy Yard Division,” Letter, Commandant, to the ASN(NYD), 27 July 1932; Both in RG181; NA-NY.  The text of the law can be found in: Hosen, The Great Depression and the New Deal: Legislative Acts in Their Entirety, 1932-1933 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1992).]
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g. The Economy Act
Just before enacting the ERCA, Congress and Hoover completed long months of negotiations over the appropriations bill for federal employees for fiscal year 1933, coming to an agreement only on the last day of the old fiscal year, 30 June 1932.  The result, labeled the “Economy Act,” imposed harsh strictures on all government workers.  For the navy yards it was the first time since the end of the world war that wages were decreed for blue-collars. [“Making appropriations for the Legislative Branch of the Government for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1933, and for other purposes.” Public, No. 212; 30 June 1932.  For a discussion of the possible savings of the Act for the navy, see: Memo for the files, n.a., n.d. (perhaps March 1932); “Civil Employees”; RG80; NA-DC. Also, see section on wage boards.]

The act was long and complex.  Its major provision decreed a one-month furlough without pay for government employees.  For institutions where this would not be practical, like navy yards, workers were placed on a five-day work week.  They lost Saturday mornings, but as they were receiving pay for Saturday afternoons the result was that they now received 44 hours of pay for working 40 hours; nonetheless, it was still a wage cut of approximately one-twelfth. [Before, they earned 48 hours for 44 hours worked.]  Their thirty days of leave with pay (vacation) was canceled for fiscal year 1933, including that already accrued but not taken, and leave thereafter reduced to fifteen days per year. The Act froze all open positions, unless deemed absolutely essential by the president to be filled, and suspended most rate and grade promotions and all administrative promotions (raises).  The regulation permitting continuance of service beyond retirement age was canceled if employees had worked long enough to be vested.  Additional pay for Sunday, holiday and overtime work was revoked and the night shift differential halved.  All monies saved by the Act were to be impounded by the Treasury Department unless waived by president.  And in another section that blatantly disregarded the merit system, this time in favor of older cultural values, the Act ruled that in administering reductions in force (RIFs) any married person living with his or her spouse who was in a class to be reduced, was to be dismissed before any other persons in that class, if the spouse was also in the service of the federal government or the District of Columbia.  Similarly in hiring, appointing officers had to give preference to people other than married persons living with their spouse, if that spouse was employed by the federal or D.C. government. [“An Act Making Appropriations for the Legislative Branch of the Government for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1933, and for other purposes,” Public, No. 212, 30 June 1932.]

There was a certain amount of cleverness to the Act from the government's point of view as at least one outside observer noted.  The seeming loss in production from the enforced furloughs was countered by the suspension of vacation and the monies saved therefrom.  But for the workers, it meant that they had to work longer to earn less. [New York Times, 15 July 1932.  A note as to the spousal removal clause: per a letter of 22 July 1932, the New York Navy Yard's Commandant said that there was no one in the Yard that would be affected.  Letter, Commandant, to the Secretary of the Navy, 22 July 1932; RG181; NA-NY.  See Black, Charlestown Navy Yard; Lott, A Long Line of Ships: Mare Island’s Century of Naval Activity in California (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute, 1954), for brief mentions of the Economy Act and its effects in the respective navy yards.]
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h. The Navy Department Finds Ways To Meet Its Personnel Needs
As might be expected, administering the details of the Economy Act brought on new problems and sometimes irregular solutions.  The Navy Department responded in a rather unique way to the personnel problems created by the new law: by finding loopholes, and ones that for the most part went unchallenged by the administration.  The Economy Act exempted temporary positions from the freeze on filling vacancies, and so, in late July the Secretary of the Navy summarily declared all naval per diem employees “temporary.”  Hence, all increases and decreases in the force, including re-ratings, reductions, reassignments and transfers “required to economically and efficiently meet the needs of the service” were authorized, much as before, and the naval field establishments allowed to retain the funds associated with positions rather than return them to the Treasury.  Adams went a bit too far though and by the end of September the need for presidential approval for pay raises on promotion (re-rating) was put back into effect.  But the Department felt that pay increases were so important for the morale of those it wished to promote that Adams intuited another loophole in the law: a one-or-more-day break in service, technically making the worker a new-hire, negated the prohibition against promotions. [Telegram, SECNAV, to ALNAVSTA, Washington, 28 July 1932 (0628-1703); RG181; NA-NY.  A hand-written note on the document, dated 9/30/32, notes the revision.   Telegram, SECNAV, to ALNAVSTA (0620 1545), 20 October 1932; RG181; NA-NY.  Note: the navy still made a distinction between these new “temporaries” and the traditional ones: people hired to fill a vacancy while waiting for the civil service hiring procedure to finish compiling a register.]

When it came to hiring IVbs, for which the Yard needed to complete an application stating that an open position was essential, it appears from the number of such sheets in the files that most reasonable management petitions for exemptions from the Act were granted.  In fact, while there was a decline in the blue-collar force in the latter half of 1932, the IVb force in the BNY remained fairly stable. [The form letter was titled “Justification for filling vacancy in an absolutely essential position under section 203 of authority of the legislative appropriation act approved June 30, 1932.” RG181; NA-NY.]

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i. Rotation of Work
There was one further, novel policy instituted for countering unemployment among Brooklyn Navy Yard workers and it circumvented civil service regulations with a conspicuous wink of the eye: the spreading of work by rotating jobs as a substitute to discharges.  It was a popular idea in the Depression and many groups, including labor, advocated it.  At the fall 1932 meeting of the AFL, delegates called for a five-day week of six-hour days as a stop-gap measure against technical unemployment, and in mid-November the president of the I.A.M. wrote to Hoover specifically about the Brooklyn Yard requesting furloughs and work-sharing instead of dismissals.  A national “share-the-work” movement grew in these years and according to the New York Times its Brooklyn chapter received a job-rotation petition from the Yard's Metal Trades Council.  They in turn forwarded it to their Washington office for presentation to the Navy Department.  In October, William Kennedy, the president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, claimed that the Navy Yard implemented the program the previous month and that already 800 partook in it. [New York Times, 12 October 1932; 19 November 1932; 18 November 1932. The movement died out after Rossevelt came into office.]

In the Yard's files rotation is first mentioned in early November 1932 when the inside machinists [a heavily organized shop] submitted a petition stating their willingness to work three days a week so that more workers could remain in the shop.  Everyone involved knew that work-sharing violated civil service regulations as to layoffs and discharges, and so the Commandant passed the petition on to the Assistant Secretary for advice.  He added that the machinists' shop already had 23 men on furlough, and given the projected work load, that not only would they most likely be discharged over the next three months, but possibly up to 120 more might be furloughed or let go.  He admitted that the program was then informally in effect in a few shops but that he did not approve of it as general policy. [Memo, Commandant, to ASN, 9 November 1932; RG181; NA-NY.]

However, rotation of work was just what was needed at the moment.  By the end of the following week the Department approved the idea for the BNY, and shortly thereafter, for the entire civilian naval establishment.  To avoid “to the greatest extent possible” further discharges for lack of work at the BNY, Commandant Phelps was directed to reduce as necessary the working time of any force facing a shortage of work by placing employees on leave without pay, on an equal, rotating basis.  The Commandant ordered each Master to survey his shop or office to determine what percentage of the work force, including supervisors, was excessive, what percentage of that excess should be placed on rotating leave without pay status, and whether a daily or weekly basis would be the appropriate length of time to place people on leave.  If there was a trade with no overage no rotation was required.  Rotation would be done by shop and rating; shops could not lend workers outside their ratings to other shops to prevent rotation within their trade or rating.  (In other words, an outside machinist could work for the inside machinist shop, but a machinist could not substitute for an electrician and vice versa.)  The Commandant cautioned each Master to retain a qualified core of workers, not to delay essential work, and most importantly, they had to maintain “absolut[e] impartially.”  If certain workers needed to be retained, at some future time they would have to put on leave later for a longer period.  Heads of divisions and the Manager could determine any necessary exceptions.  By mid-November management created a pool of employees on rotating leave, placing one-third on leave without pay each succeeding week in the shops that had excess labor.. [Telegram, SecNav to ALNAVSTA, 21 November 1932 (0621 1021); Commandant's Notice, from W.W. Phelps, To Be Posted on All Bulletin Boards, 17 November 1932; RG181; NA-NY. This is a copy of a letter from the ASN (Ernest Lee Jahncke) to The Commandant, NY, NY, NY, 16 November 1932. Memo, from the Commandant (W.W. Phelps), to All Concerned (To Be Posted), 18 November 1932; RG181; NA-NY.]

Production brought out the imperfections in this new procedure and within a week the Commandant asked permission of the Department to curtail the percentage of those in any one shop susceptible to rotating leave to one-third per month.  Initially, the Assistant Secretary refused the request, but reversed himself after a week and agreed to the revised ceiling, instructing the Yard that when the new limit was reached civil service procedures were again to take effect and excess employees furloughed or discharged, whichever was most applicable under the individual circumstances. [Commandant's Notice (W.W. Phelps) to All Bulletin Boards, 8 December 1932, copying a memo from ASN Jahncke, 6 December 1932, to the Commandant. RG181; NA-NY.]

No mention is made of why the Commandant requested the revision in policy, but some of the problems involved with rotation are outlined in a memo a Department civilian administrator wrote after being sent to inquire into the practice in the Brooklyn yard.  He toured the shops, spoke with their Masters, and decided that while beneficial in intent and character, rotating leave presented two problems.  One was its effect on production and morale.  He pointed out that rotation in any individual shop was not necessarily in the best interests of the force as a whole.  It slowed down work, and given the staggered schedule of trades in constructing, or even in repairing ships [e.g., shipfitters did their work before electricians did theirs], that by not using all the workers possible on one phase of a job, and then laying off or discharging some of them, the Yard actually risked lengthening the unemployment of those workers who could not start their allotted work until their predecessors in the schedule finished theirs, thereby driving up costs and inefficiency for whatever project was being worked on.  There was also the concurrent possibility, already mentioned by the Commandant, that management risked workers' dissatisfaction if they felt the leave-selection process to be unfair.  Although the administrator felt confident in the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the Yard's workers, he still felt that any perception of anything less than impartiality in the layoffs would provide ample fodder for manipulation by an unidentified group of “leftists” who were then continually leafleting the Yard's gates.  Secondly, the investigator mentioned the obvious problem that if too many workers in a shop were on leave at the same time, he estimated a threshold of one-half, that the program became self-defeating in that no one could earn even a minimal living wage.  The Department's representative thought that the only reliable solution to countering unemployment was to shorten the work week or day further, although he did not think it politically feasible.  Therefore his official recommendation was one he thought in everyone's best interests: to discharge people, according to their efficiency ratings.  Although rotation did not turn out to be the boon many originally thought it would be, it did become another tool for the Navy Yard to manage the employment levels within its shops.  [“Report of a survey of employment and labor conditions prevailing in the Brooklyn Navy Yard made at the direction of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy,” Memo, from Sam M. Jones, Civil Administrative Assistant, to the ASN; n.d. (may be late 1932 to early 1933); RG80; NA-DC.] [On leftist organizing in and around the BNY.]
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The Navy Responds to its Critics
The deluge of criticism against the Navy Department from its civilian workers, the press, Congressional members, and other concerned citizens over its employment policies continued throughout the Hoover administration.  Given Hoover's political and economic priorities there was only so much the Navy could do, but its representatives were often ineffectual if not counter-productive in their responses to the concerns and worries of the public.  In 1932, feeling defensive from constant newspaper attacks, the Secretary prepared a press release he hoped would show that the “the Navy Department is doing what it can to support the administration policy of maintaining wages and employment.”  He admitted that though the total employed civilian industrial force of 33,171 in 1931 compared unfavorably to 1929's force of 36,302, it was greater than the 30,767 and 30,869 employed in 1927 and 1928 respectively, and he reminded the reader of his continued renewal of the 1929 wage schedule.  Omitted in this declaration was Hoover's cutback in the cruiser building program, with the boost to employment in the navy yards that building to the original schedule would have brought about.  Adams stated that under no circumstances could the Department perfectly stabilize its yards' work loads because of the constant movement of the fleet and the unpredictable needs of its individual ships.  If anything, he argued, the navy was a positive economic force: in fiscal year 1931 American commercial interests directly or indirectly reaped almost all its $360 million of expenditures, and virtually all branches of industry supplied it with goods or services.  The Navy was definitely “not adding to unemployment by curtailing its activities.” [“Employment under the Navy Department,” n.a., n.d. (early 1932?); RG80; NA-DC.]

Few people were appeased by the Department's comprehension of, and response to, the seriousness of the times.  The folders of protest letters from the New York metropolitan area to the Department are thick and show a wide range of complaints to which the Department generally replied with a few stock answers.  For instance, in August, September, and October of 1932, Adams received letters respectively from James C. Quinn, the Secretary-Treasurer of New York City's Labor Council, Charles J. Barbuti, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Green Point Chamber of Commerce, and William Kennedy, the President of Brooklyn's Chamber of Commerce, protesting an alleged lack of work assigned to the BNY. The Department's answer was a standard one: the navy yard's current force was above its recent average and was expected to remain so for the next few years; the Department did its best to stabilize work in accordance with the needs of the Fleet and the national economy; and the Brooklyn yard had its fair share of work and could only receive more at the expense of other navy yards.  Adams and Jahncke were not ultimately in control of their department's budget and could perhaps not reply otherwise, but yet the formal tone of their letters showed a certain lack of tack. [Letter, Adams, to Quinn, Secretary-Treasurer, Central Trades and Labor Council of Greater New York and Vicinity, 30 August 1932; Letter, Jahncke, to Barbuti, Chairman of Board of Directors, Green Point Chamber of Commerce, Brooklyn, 20 September 1932; Letter, Adams, to Kennedy, President, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, 25 October 1932. All in: RG80; NA-DC.]

There were other inquiries about individual cases of laying off employees that the Assistant Secretary's office or the Yard itself needed to answer and whose replies revealed some disingenuousness.  To give some examples, in February 1932 William H. Mahon, Secretary of the Welfare Committee of Brooklyn's VFW chapter wrote to Congressman John Delaney, who in turn forwarded the letter to the Department for comment, about a complicated case of alleged discrimination against one of its members, a veteran rehired by the Yard in 1931 and then placed on leave without pay in January after receiving an efficiency rating of 79.9.  Similarly, both Senator Wagner and Congressman Hamilton Fish, in March and April of 1932, passed on to the Commandant complaints they had received from certain electricians in the Yard alleging favoritism in who was laid off for lack of work, effected by shop management through the manipulation of efficiency ratings.  In answering both charges the Commandant claimed that investigations were made but otherwise gave no specifics.  He assured the Congressional inquirers that the Yard could not be at fault because as a matter of policy it conscientiously adhered to civil service regulations on personnel management. [Letter, Mahon, Secretary, Welfare Committee, Brooklyn Council Kings County, VFW of the US, Brooklyn, to Hon. John Delaney, Representative, 7th Congressional District of New York, 1 February 1932; Letter, [group of Yard electricians, names omitted by Wagner] to Senator Wagner, passed on to the Commandant, Navy Yard, New York, 12 February 1932.  A similar letter was passed on by Representative Hamilton Fish on 22 March.  Letters and replies are in RG181; NA-NY. On the manipulating of efficiency ratings.]
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Conclusion
In the last months of the Hoover administration work in the Yard was moderate, its main project, the New Orleans, nearing its launch date.  The repair schedule was light but set off partially by the construction, on the second ways, of the Yard's largest all-welded steel vessel to date, a barge, which was launched in late September.  Preliminary work on the destroyer that would next occupy the ways had begun, and the reconstruction of Dry Dock 2, a major project of the previous few years, had been completed, giving the Yard once again four working dry docks.  As to employment numbers, the BNY hit a rough patch in mid-1930, its force decreasing by almost one-quarter from the year before, but by the end of 1932, the overall numbers were up to 90% of their immediate pre-Depression totals.  This number is deceptive though, as much of the gain came from the growth came from the IVb staff, who increased in size by 60% over the Hoover years.  The skilled trades, however over these same years fell from 2164 to 1662, maintaining the one-quarter drop in workers. [New York Times, 15 July 1932; Yard's building schedule. For employment numbers.]

A new employment policy had been established in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, one that the Manager said in 1932 was “drastically modified” from what had been in place a year earlier. Though this was true, it was the yard workers who bore most of the burden of the recent administrative changes.  Yard management consistently won exemptions to the new budgetary restrictions and to civil service regulations if so doing allowed production to proceed, however constricted it may have been.  The record for Yard workers as to wages and employment was more ambiguous.  What relief they received, and it was significant, they won early in the Depression before anyone realized the extent of the crisis within which the country was engulfed.  But as the economy continued to stagnate, Yard workers saw more of the government's burden shift to them as their financial stability was chipped away through cut-backs to their wage-package and down-rating [the "balanced shop" concept], and less than aggressive commitments to maintaining employment, such as the delayed cruiser program. [“Appointments, Reratings and Transfers of Employees, etc. as affected by recent Federal legislation.” Memorandum for file, by P.B. Dungan, 18 November 1932; RG181; NA-NY. There were other options, even within the restrictions of the time, such as an unofficial tolerance of make-work and featherbedding.  Although no one could advocate such suggestions openly, given the incessant petitioning of the navy for work and the obvious realization that the current administration would not revise its shipbuilding program drastically, something of this sort must have been what at least some workers and their supporters were hoping would result from their insistent pressure.]

Such remained the Brooklyn Navy Yard until March 1933, at which point ex-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt became president, bringing with him a different political agenda, one that despite further budgetary setbacks in wages in its initial year, promised hope for the future of all navy yard workers by permanently linking defense spending to the country's economic growth.
 
 
 
BNY Civilian Employment Figures: 31 December 1928 - 31 December 1932
Grade IVb IVa     III    II     I Total
12/31/28 451 155 2128 752 267 3753
  6/30/29 453 171 2164 746 287 3821
12/31/29 475 152 1937 700 258 3522
  6/30/30 503 144 1593 558 205 3003
12/31/30 543 142 1800 670 254 3409
  6/30/31 730 154 1727 596 397 3604
12/31/31 780 165 2091 852 266 4154
  6/30/32 698 147 1847 722 291 3705
12/31/32 726 136 1662 616 306 3446

Source:

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John R Stobo    ©    September 2004