Kokomo's Count

The moment U.S. arms manufacturers began to step up their operations to Franklin Roosevelt's 168-hour week, they ran into the most discouraging shortage of all: skilled labor. A spotty reality for months, it became serious when key industries like machine tool manufacture tried to add a third and fourth shift. In many cases foremen, lead men and supervisors have had to work 70 hours a week to keep things going.

Direct war industries, figures OPM, now employ 4,000,000 workers, by June will employ 6,000,000, by June 1943, 9,000,000. Of these, only 25% can be unskilled. So serious was the skill shortage in machine tools that Ford Hinrichs, acting chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, began talking about the need for "organized piracy" --i.e., a sort of priority on skills (he did not say labor conscription).

But there is still an untapped source of skilled labor: misfits. An inventory of skills would show how many workers can be upgraded to more skilled jobs at once, without training. As Detroit has done with its engineers (TIME, March 31), Kokomo, Ind. (pop. 33,795) last week counted returns from a survey of its skilled labor resources.

The mayor and the Employment Security Office manager first got a check list of 187 occupations from Washington. They organized a committee from the local A.F. of L., C.I.O., churches, Chamber of Commerce. They distributed 14,000 lists throughout Kokomo--to policemen, janitors, defense workers, drugstore cowboys. The first returns showed a big supply of skills going to waste in the wrong jobs. One early estimate: 40% of Kokomo labor can be upgraded. For instance:

> A man skilled in precision-grinding, lathe-operating, pipefitting and sheet-metal work was a shipping clerk.

> A man trained as a babbitter, boring-mill operator, die maker and machinist was running a sewage plant.

> A drill-press operator and tool grinder was a janitor.

> A core maker and molder was a policeman.

> A skilled barrel reamer and glass blower was digging ditches.

Kokomo hoped by its census to get more defense orders (its seven big factories had only $3,000,000 worth), thus to stave off priorities unemployment. In the process it resurrected the fact that the U.S. is a land of skills, and that there is more than one way to break a bottleneck.

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