Why Should I Work Any Harder? (1943), a Pittsburgh forge company's plant poster

Why should I work any harder? I'm not fighting the war! is a 1943 poster copyrighted by Heppenstall Co., Steel Forgings, of Pittsburgh. An older worker in glasses and a waistcoat stands with hands on hips while, behind him, a figure under a swastika flag oversees a bench (NAID 513569).

What the sheet prints

An older man in glasses and a waistcoat stands with his hands on his hips, a posture of mild defiance. The question beside him is his own. Behind him is a second scene: a figure wearing an armband, under a swastika flag, standing over a workbench as its overseer.

Why

should I work

any

harder ?

I'm not fighting the War !

[signature: illegible]

[imprint: COPYRIGHT 1943, HEPPENSTALL CO., STEEL FORGINGS, PITTSBURGH, PA.]

Who made it

The imprint names a private company: Heppenstall Co., Steel Forgings, of Pittsburgh, with a 1943 copyright. The artist's signature cannot be read. The archive lists the issuer type as a corporation, the audience as the domestic public, and the themes as home front and labor. The National Archives holds the sheet in the World War II Posters series of Record Group 44, and the archive records its rights as public domain. The record does not say where Heppenstall posted it.

An employer's question

The archive's tag is fear appeal. The poster quotes an attitude and then shows the consequence it is said to risk: work under a swastika, with an overseer at your shoulder. The worker is not called a traitor. He is drawn as a reasonable-looking man asking a question, and the background answers it.

The source matters. A company is speaking, not a federal office, and the archive lists its audience as the domestic public. The message has a point: production mattered to the war. But an employer has its own interest in how hard people work, and the poster does not mention pay, hours, or conditions. A worker's question about his own labor deserved more than a picture of the enemy, and a reader is entitled to ask who gains from the extra effort.

Douglas Aircraft's plant character is collected on the Tokio Kid page; another Douglas production poster is Squeeze In One More. A government sheet on the same theme is Production Lines Are Battle Lines!, and Days Off Cost Lives! at least names the reasons workers missed shifts.