Logsdon outlined the district leadership's position to the national office early in the war:

National CIO leaders proposed the Industry Council Plan (ICP), commonly referred to as the Murray Plan after its titular author, Phillip Murray, the new CIO president.

The Murray Plan called for organizing industry councils, composed of representatives of government, labor, and management, to coordinate the nation's wartime production needs and labor supply.

The councils would have the power to allocate natural resources, distribute orders for production, and direct manpower in a rational way, ensuring that human issues such as labor supply, unemployment levels, or housing availability were considered in contract allocation, and that small business would receive a share of the contracts.

But CIO leaders were unable or unwilling to mobilize workers in support of the Murray Plan. Divided on issues of war preparations, CIO officials did little more than make appeals to sympathetic liberals in federal government echelons. The CIO's representative in the government war mobilization apparatus, Sidney Hillman, refused to advocate the ICP

Meanwhile the CIO and Sidney Hillman, the CIO's New Deal representative in the Roosevelt Administration, cut the UE out of any attempts to gain entrance and leverage within wartime agencies or advocacy of the Murray Plan.

Hillman refused to appoint UE members to positions within the wartime agencies because "our organization is tinged with 'red' . . . .'"

District 8 developed a community-based approach to promote labor's inclusion in wartime planning. Sentner viewed mobilization for the war as an opportunity that might allow U.S. labor to move toward the more politicized direction of the British Labor Party. The Left used the Murray Plan as a platform to legitimize the pursuit of such a program.

In mid-September, in response to this campaign, Mayor Dress organized a Midwest conference on priorities in Chicago.

1500 delegates came to a meeting in Chicago, and Sentner reported that as the conference got underway, labor led the way, and it was the labor program that was endorsed.

Sentner was elected as a representative to the group, with an office in Office of Production Management, a position equal to the industry representative (and a distinct difference from the status of generally subordinate labor advisory boards to which labor was relegated.

The program was very effective, and won a core of supporters and community respect among many workers in the small cities where it was implemented.

But the CIO at the national level was losing interest in the effort to fight for labor's role in planning. One UE leader reported that the CIO called the Murray Plan "a desirable, but utopian thing," and lamented that "so far as being a labor organization with the old punch, the CIO is losing it."

Still, this issue of lack of wartime planning was a focus for the radicals in District 8, who argued that labor should have a larger role in planning for production position

Pearl Harbor and the subsequent massive wartime jobs allocations shifted the entire CIO toward a focus on winning the war, and led to the no-strike pledge, which limited workers ability to win more rights.