Men, Men, More Men

>In Cincinnati a desperate defense manufacturer told the State Employment Service he must have some boring mill operators right away. Answer: "We've got one--but there is no record of his ever having been sober more than four days in a row." Manufacturer: "Can he run a boring mill?" . . . "Yes." . . . "Send him out."

> In Indianapolis a needy manufacturer hired a tool and die maker aged 89. >In Philadelphia the Frankford Arsenal needed workers to make time fuses, tried watchmakers without success, finally hired women embroiderers and found them just right.

> In Pittsburgh a Carnegie Tech instructor got home after midnight twice running and found his wife waiting with blood in her eye. He: "You know I'm teaching a defense class." She: "That class lets out at 10:30." He: "It's supposed to ... but it never does. Those fellows crowd around my desk and start shooting questions at me. First thing I know it's midnight."

Last week the U. S. was beginning to realize what mobilizing its man power for defense meant in terms of human skill. Said William Knudsen: "I'm tired of the word 'billions'. Dollars aren't production; man-hours are." The magnitude of the task (surveyed last week by the New York Times) had not yet been fully felt, for full production was still waiting on the building of plants and machines. Engineers estimated that to complete the defense program laid down by the Government last fall would take 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 man-years of labor. Those men were not yet in sight.

Congress had appropriated $137,377,710 to train an industrial army. Some 300,000 mechanics had already been enrolled in vocational schools (TIME, July 8, et seq.) and 47,000 engineers were learning to officer this army in engineering schools. But it was only a start. The nation's great reserve of man power, rusted by eleven years of idleness, had to be retrained.

In some cities more than half the trainees for defense jobs found no jobs when they finished their course. Reason: they had been trained for the wrong jobs or in the wrong places. Alarmed at this evidence of waste time and motion that the U. S. could ill afford, training officials under Defense Commissioner Sidney Hillman tried to devise a plan for coordinating training with jobs. They found one ready-made in Connecticut.

Two years ago Connecticut's Governor Raymond E. Baldwin appointed a Commission to find out how private industry could employ the unemployed. As its chairman Governor Baldwin picked from the blue a 38-year-old Hartford manufacturer (horseshoe nails, chains, grinding machines) named Carl Albert Gray. Tall, husky Carl Gray, a onetime machinist who worked his way through Dartmouth, decided first to find out how many of the jobless were employable, what they could do. He learned that more than 90% were employable. He also learned, to his surprise, that Connecticut factories needed 3,000 men, did not know where to find them. Eventually he concluded that each community must deal with unemployment in its own way, by 1) making an exact survey of jobs available and 2) training men for those specific jobs.

He started in Hartford. He formed a committee of industrialists, labor leaders, educators, Legionnaires, and launched a school for factory workers in a State Trade School. Manufacturers supplied equipment and teachers. The course ran five weeks, 40 hours a week. Fifty-three men enrolled in the first class, 53 were graduated, 53 got jobs. That was before the defense program began.

By last week 26 Connecticut cities and towns had similar schools and the "Connecticut Plan" was famed throughout the U. S. To the factories and aircraft plants of Connecticut, which boasts that it has been armorer to the nation since the Revolution and that no airplane flies in the U. S. today without Connecticut-made parts, every five weeks go 2,000 graduates of Mr. Gray's job-training classes.

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