Vintage Poster Archives
Don't Be A Job Hopper 1943 | Home Front Poster
Don't Be A Job Hopper 1943 | Home Front Poster
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A green cartoon grasshopper, salivating, dollar-eyed, gripping a lunchpail and a fistful of banknotes, scuttles in front of a teal-silhouetted factory skyline. Red all-caps headlines bracket the image above and below: 'DON'T BE A JOB HOPPER' and 'STICK TO YOUR JOB!' The humour is pointed: this is a wartime labour-management tool, not entertainment.
The poster was drawn by Walt Disney Studios for the US Office of War Information in 1943 and printed the following year by the US Government Printing Office for the War Manpower Commission. By 1943, close to 90% of Disney's studio output was government-commissioned war work. The grasshopper character echoes the studio's 1934 Silly Symphony 'The Grasshopper and the Ants', placing the message in a register familiar to working-age Americans. US wartime unemployment had fallen to around 1.4%; the acute problem was defence workers using the labour shortage to chase higher wages, and the government's response was to frame job-hopping as unpatriotic.
The on-plate credit '© Walt Disney / For O.W.I.' and the US Government Printing Office margin number make this one of the most completely documented home-front poster commissions of the period. Held in the collections of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and the National Archives.
Reproduced from a high-quality archival scan on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A studied piece for collectors of WW2 home-front material and Disney wartime graphic work alike.
