Don't be a job hopper is a 1944 War Manpower Commission poster signed "© WALT DISNEY FOR O.W.I." A drooling cartoon grasshopper with a lunch pail and a fistful of dollar bills walks away from a factory skyline, and the text tells workers to stick to their jobs (NAID 514129).
A grasshopper with a fistful of dollars
The pun is in the picture. A cartoon grasshopper in a work cap, drooling, holds a lunch pail in one hand and a fistful of dollar bills in the other, and walks away from a skyline of factories. The headline names him. A second line sets the soldier beside the worker and tells the worker what his duty is.
DON'T BE A
JOB HOPPER
[signature:] © WALT DISNEY
FOR O.W.I.
Our soldiers are sticking to their guns
STICK TO YOUR JOB!
WAR MANPOWER COMMISSION
[imprint:] U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944-O-599046
Three names on one sheet
The poster carries the name of the War Manpower Commission as issuer, a Walt Disney copyright line made out "for O.W.I.", and a Government Printing Office job number for 1944. It is a federal sheet with a drawing under a Disney copyright, credited to the Office of War Information. FRAME sets the issuer type to "State", the purpose to "Mobilize or secure compliance", and the themes to labor and the home front. The National Archives holds it in Record Group 44.
Whose choice a job is
FRAME tags name-calling and transfer. The name is "JOB HOPPER", and the drawing does the rest: the drool and the dollar bills say that a man who leaves one plant for another does it out of greed. The transfer runs from the soldier sticking to his gun to the worker who is told to stick to his job.
That comparison is the weak point. A soldier serves under military orders. A civilian worker sells his labor, and moving to a better wage is the ordinary way a free worker answers an employer who pays too little. The poster cites no rule against changing jobs, and the record does not say whether any rule applied to its readers. On its face it asks, and it shames. Asking is within a government's rights. Drawing a worker who takes a better offer as a drooling insect shames a choice the sheet itself does not call unlawful.
The same commission's 1942 sheet Americans All took a better line, printing workers' surnames beside a Roosevelt quotation against discrimination. Compulsion in the labor field did happen: the Interior Department's 1943 notice United States Property! printed Harold Ickes's order taking possession of coal mines. The Office of War Information hub indexes that agency's English-language posters.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Don't be a job hopper, 1944. War Manpower Commission; artist Walt Disney for O.W.I. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-651, NAID 514129, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
