Success Team

Messrs. Channing Dooley, formerly of Socony-Vacuum Oil, and Walter Dietz, formerly of Western Electric, are not Washington headliners. Charged with running the Training Within Industry program of the War Manpower Commission, their names have been conspicuously absent from all the discussion and argument of the manpower shortage. Nevertheless, Messrs. Dooley and Dietz have been doing a job and a big one.

The job is to help industry help itself in training new recruits and upgrading men more experienced into still more responsible jobs. Two years ago they began with only seven first-rate instructors. These seven trained other instructors who in turn went out and taught foremen how to educate men under them to work faster, or to move up to more complicated jobs. Already the Dooley-Dietz organization figures that it has trained 230,000 foremen in over 5,000 plants employing over 5.5 million workers. It is now training some 8,000 additional foremen per week.

Examples of Dooley-Dietz successes:

> Everybody said it takes two weeks to train a new loom tender to tie a weaver's knot. Dooley and Dietz did not believe it. They went to a New England mill loaded with war orders and hard-pressed to find workers. The manager sent for the best loom-tender in the plant. He showed the visitors, with lightning movements of his hands, how a good man does it. Gradually they slowed him down to a speed the eye could follow, made him analyze what each finger does. Hours later they knew exactly what happens when the fingers fly. Then they called in a man from the accounting department. In 20 minutes they had him expertly tying weaver's knots.

> A percher (textile for inspector) is getting hard to find and it took a month to train a new man to spot all the possible defects in cloth as it comes off the looms. Dooley and Dietz bet they could reduce the month to half a day. They had the management get samples of all possible defects. They sewed the samples into a strip 75 yards long and put it on rollers. Then they had the No. 1 inspector teach them what to look for. They analyzed and sent for a green man. After watching the roll go by a few times he was calling the errors correctly. Dooley cherishes a letter which came in a few weeks later. Triumphantly, the manager reported Dooley was wrong: experience showed it took a whole day, not just half a day, to bring a new man up to a level of reliability.

> A Buffalo die-casting company reports TWI has made it possible to break in inspectors of hand grenades in one day where it used to take five.

>A lens grinding firm testified that training in grinding quartz crystals had been reduced from three weeks to three days.

>Essex Wire Corp. of Detroit reported a 34% reduction in scrap after putting its people through TWI training.

Looked on with considerably suspicion at first, the Dooley and Dietz team now gets fair cooperation both from labor and management. Biggest kick of labor (especially from craft unions) was that Dooley-Dietz methods might replace the old-tie system of apprenticeships, break down the union's monopoly on education and create too many trained workers for too few skilled jobs at war's end. To hardworking Dooley and Dietz, faced by as many as six million new war workers in 1943, this objection will be academic for some time to come.

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