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128 Monthly Lab. Rev. 44 (2005)
BLS and the Marshall Plan: The Forgotten Story

handle is hein.journals/month128 and id is 716 raw text is: Th Mashl Plan BLS and the Marshall Plan: the forgotten story The statistical technical assistance of BLS increased productive efficiency and labor productivity in Western European industry after World War HI; technological literature surveys and plan-organized plant visits supplemented instruction in statistical measurement Solidelle F. Wasser and Michael L. Dolfman Solidelle F. Wasser is a Senior Economist and Michael L. Dolfman is the Regional Commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in New York, New York, E-mail: Dolfman.Michael @bls.gov Wasser.Solidelle @bls.gov Te European Recovery Program (Marshall s lan) has been recognized as the most uccessful foreign-aid program ever under- taken by the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (aLs) role in the accomplishments of the Marshall Plan's Technical Assistance Program has largely been ignored. This article highlights the BLS achievements in the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was named for then Secre- tary of State George C. Marshall, who, on June 5, 1947, proposed his solution to war-devastated Europe. The proposal was enacted into law in April 1948 as the European Recovery Program, which created an Economic Cooperation Admin- istration Agency to organize and administer the program. The Marshall Plan recognized that the economies of Western European countries had continued to deteriorate in the immediate post- World War II period and that provisions of mas- sive loans to individual countries had proven to be a failure.' Marshall's recovery plan proposal was revolutionary in that it required mutual coop- eration among those 16 countries (a 17th, the Ger- man Federal Republic, joined in 1949) that re- sponded to the invitation to participate. Recipi- ents of American assistance under the Marshall Plan joined together to produce multilateral solu- tions to common economic problems. The result was a massive effort to improve the economic con- dition of 270 million people in Western Europe through increasing their domestic production by collaborative effort. The participants proposed to do this by strengthening the economic superstruc- ture of Western Europe. An important component of the Marshall Plan was the statistical technical assistance offered by BLS and directed at increasing productive effi- ciency and labor productivity in Western Euro- pean industry. Because of the special circum- stances caused by the war crises, BLS efforts wid- ened to include foreign assistance. These efforts reached almost every plant in every industry, marketing agency, and agricultural entity in West- ern Europe, introducing them to a technology more than a generation in advance of what they were using.2 Increases in industrial efficiency and productivity have been acknowledged as a major contributing factor to Western Europe's postwar economic recovery. Analysis by BLS of dislocations caused by the crises of war gave it good preparation to analyze post-war production problems. Therefore, BLS was not only capable of using its statistical measures to identify prob- lems of inefficiency, but also could instruct Eu- ropeans in the most modern American industrial practices. Surveys discussed in technological literature and, more directly, plan-organized plant visits supplemented BLS instruction in statistical measurement. On June 7, 1940, Congress passed an act autho- rizing BLS to make continuing studies of labor pro- ductivity and appropriated funds for the estab- 44 Monthly Labor Review June 2005

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