Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
Before the United States entered the war, defense orders and the first peacetime draft were already deciding who had a wage and who had to leave home.
A stretched household could gain hours in a shipyard or an aircraft plant and could also lose a wage earner to the draft in the same season.
A household with a skilled trade the services needed in the plants could see overtime the Depression had made hard to imagine.
A contractor with a government order had a customer that paid, and a firm that lost its workers to the draft or to a higher defense wage had a different war.
The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 created a peacetime draft, and orders from Britain, after France fell, pulled idle plants back to work.
A paycheck tied to those contracts was real money in towns that had been short of hours.
It existed to supply a war, so a household could not treat it as an ordinary job that would stay because customers liked the product.
Selective Training and Service Act of 1940