War Labor Board refused to honor this request. But Millis was not adept at bureaucratic maneuvering, and did not understand that press attention could help him win battles with the NWLB. For the next three years, Millis tried to secure a jurisdictional agreement with NWLB chair George W. Taylor, but these discussions proved fruitless and Millis broke them off in June 1945. The NWLB also heavily raided the NLRB for staff, significantly affecting Millis' ability to ensure NLRB operations. From July 1942 to October 1943, the NLRB lost more than 150 staff, including several regional directors, to the War Labor Board. Additional changes came with the passage of the War Labor Disputes Act on June 25, 1943. Enacted over Roosevelt's veto after 400,000 coal miners, their wages significantly lowered due to high wartime inflation, struck for a $2-a-day wage increase, Whenever a union threatened to strike, the legislation required NLRB (in part) to generate a strike ballot outlining all the collective bargaining proposals and counter-proposals, wait 30 days, and then hold a strike vote. The War Labor Disputes Act proved very burdensome. The NLRB processed 2,000 WLDA cases from 1943 to the end of 1945, of which 500 were strike votes. The act's strike vote procedures did little to stop strikes, however: 203 of the 232 strike votes taken in 1944 led to strike, and Millis feared unions were using the referendums to whip up pro-strike feelings among their members. Millis also believed the law's strike vote process actually permitted more strikes to occur than the NLRB would have allowed under its old procedures. There were so many strike vote filings in the six months after the war ended that NLRB actually shut down its long distance telephone lines, cancelled all out of town travel, suspended all public hearings, and suspended all other business to accommodate the workload. Additional Board personnel changes further moderated the NLRB during Millis' tenure. John Mills Houston was appointed to the Board in 1943 after William S. Leiserson's term expired and Leiserson did not seek reappointment to the agency. Millis formed a voting alliance with Houston some time in late 1944. Despite this alliance, Millis sometimes was unable to form majorities on the Board. He vigorously dissented in American News Company, Inc., 55 1302 (1944), a decision in which the Board held that strikers not protected from discharge or refusals of reinstatement if they struck