Free Labor Will Win is a 1942 War Production Board poster, number A-18, built on a photograph by Anton Bruehl. A welder in helmet, gloves and apron stands in front of a large U.S. flag, over a yellow band carrying the three-word slogan (NAID 514329).
Photograph and slogan
Bruehl's photograph does the work, and three words caption it. A welder in helmet, gloves and apron stands with a large American flag filling the space behind him. Below is a yellow band with the slogan in two lines.
FREE LABOR
WILL WIN
[imprint:] Anton Bruehl Photo
WAR PRODUCTION BOARD
WASHINGTON, D.C. A-18
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1942-O-473674
The board's series
The imprint gives the War Production Board in Washington and a series number, A-18, with a 1942 printing-office job number. The record's audience field reads "Domestic public," its purpose "Mobilize or secure compliance," and its themes labor and the home front. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 44. No print run is given.
What "free" meant here
The archive flags the word itself. It tags glittering generalities because "free" is a virtue word the poster never defines, and transfer because the flag lends the nation's standing to a man at a welding job.
The word is worth taking at face value, because it is the strongest claim the poster makes. Free labor, in the plain sense, is work a person chooses and can leave, for a wage he can bargain over. On that reading the slogan is a real boast about the American system: the country would outproduce its enemies with workers who chose to be there.
The same board tested that meaning in the same year. Its poster A-15, When You're A.W.O.L. You're Working for the Axis, borrowed the military shorthand for absent without leave and applied it to a worker who missed a shift. A worker who is free to be absent and a worker who is told that absence serves the enemy are not quite the same worker. The two sheets sat in one series and did not reconcile the difference.
Other War Production Board sheets on this site include Production Lines Are Battle Lines. The prewar fight over who spoke for workers is in the case study Unions and employers both campaigned, which runs from 1910 to 1941. The Roosevelt administration essay covers the wartime government.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Free Labor Will Win, 1942. War Production Board (photograph by Anton Bruehl). 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-835, NAID 514329, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
