Millis, wishing to return to his home in Chicago, resigned from the NLRB shortly after passage of the NLRA and was succeeded on the Board by John M. Carmody. Even as he left the Board, however, Millis successfully recommended David J. Saposs as first Chief Economist to lead the new NLRB Division of Economic Research. Service between NLRBs Millis returned to the University of Chicago. One of his students at this time was Oliver Cox, an African American who later was a noted economist. In 1937, he was appointed a member of the Illinois Commission on Unemployment and President Roosevelt appointed him to a Railway Labor Act fact-finding board in a dispute between the Chicago Great Western Railway and Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. His railway panel found that the railroad should not impose a 15 percent wage reduction on the workers. Roosevelt appointed him to a second railways panel in 1938 to arbitrate a dispute between the million members of the Railway Labor Executives' Association (an umbrella group representing 18 railway labor organizations) and the Association of American Railways (which represented all long-haul railroads in the U.S.). In 1940, he sat on a third arbitration panel which resolved a long-running wage dispute between American Railway Express and its unions. In 1940, President Roosevelt asked Millis to become the permanent arbiter between General Motors (GM) and the United Auto Workers (UAW). The 1937 collective bargaining agreement between the company and its union established a temporary, voluntary arbitration procedure, which was made permanent in the 1940 contract. It was the first permanent arbitration mechanism in any mass production industry, and not only the union but many companies and politicians were eager to see it succeed. Several of President Roosevelt's aides and confidantes urged Millis to accept the position. He agreed. However, Millis refused the large salary that was offered to him, and instead took only the same moderate salary he had been receiving at the university. Although he was arbitrator for only a few months, he laid the groundwork for smooth labor relations not only at General Motors but set a pattern for arbitration that spread throughout the manufacturing sector of the economy. Finally, in March 1940, Millis joined Collective Bargaining Advisors, a private group dedicated to promoting peaceful labor relations through "scientific" practices. NLRB chairmanship Millis had been GM-UAW arbitrator for only a few months when he was asked to be