Days Off Cost Lives! (1943), a plant leaflet on absenteeism

Days Off Cost Lives! is a 1943 War Production Board leaflet written in the voice of a plant's joint labor-management committee. It lists illness, accidents, housing, transport, child care and ration-board hours as causes of missed work before asking workers to cut voluntary days off (NAID 513964).

What the leaflet says

The headline is a fear line. The body text is more careful than the headline. It admits that most workers miss a day now and then, and that sometimes the fault is theirs and sometimes not. Line drawings around the text name the causes: illness, accidents, bad housing, poor transportation, child care, shopping, and the hours of the ration board.

DAYS OFF COST LIVES!

Your joint labor-management committee wants to cut down absenteeism . . . wants to wipe out the absentee bugs that have been biting us. And your committee needs your help.

Here's our program of attack:

1. Find the root causes of absenteeism.

2. Eradicate them.

Most absences have contributing and understandable causes. They are involuntary. But some absences are voluntary.

These voluntary days off must be cut down if production is to be pushed up!

Who issued it

The archive credits the War Production Board's War Production Drive Headquarters, with the text written as if from a plant's labor-management committee. The leaflet closes with the line "Don't Let the ABSENTEE BUGS Get You." A matching streamer with the same slogan is a separate record in the archive.

How to read it

Two things are true of this sheet. The headline ties a missed shift to lost lives, and it gives no figure to back the link. That is the fear appeal, and it is the part to read with care. The body, though, does something many wartime sheets skip. It concedes that housing, buses, sick children and ration lines kept people home, and it says the committee will go after those causes first.

The ask is written as coming from inside the plant, from a committee that included labor. It does not threaten discipline. A reader can credit that and still note that "Every Day Counts!" put moral weight on workers whose problems the text itself called involuntary. For the federal print program around sheets like this, see the OWI domestic branch case study and the Office of War Information hub. A plant leaflet is the mildest instrument the war government had; the Roosevelt administration essay lists the stronger ones, from the Office of Censorship to Executive Order 9066.