In my November 8th post I discussed Daddy, what did you do
in World War II? Drying oxygen for high-altitude flight.
Once General Air Conditioning had their GAC-3 oxygen drying
cartridge (shown above) designed there was another obstacle. Where could they
find production workers to assemble millions of them under “white-glove”
conditions? Leafy, the wife of the General Air Conditioning (GAC) president George
Metzger, solved that problem.
She went to meetings of women’s clubs and pitched the job as
a patriotic duty to the wives of business executives who up to now had stayed
home. A day-shift crew of those ‘society ladies’ in
Cincinnati did that assembly job. They produced 3,625,000 cartridges. To keep
them happy George had arranged for them to have both a mid-morning coffee break
and a mid-afternoon break for high tea. Beverages and pastries were served by a
Negro man in uniform.
Meanwhile, up in Detroit Nick Dreystadt, who ran the Cadillac
division of General Motors (GM), went to the other end of the social spectrum
as was described by Peter F. Drucker in his 1994 biographical book, Adventures
of a Bystander:
“When I did my study at GM, Dreystadt – against the advice
of GM’s top management – bid on the nastiest defense job around, the production
of a high-precision item. (I believe it was a new bombsight, and the first one
to use electronics). Everybody knew that the work demanded highly skilled
mechanics. There was absolutely no labor available in Detroit, let alone highly
skilled mechanics. ‘It’s got to be done,’ Dreystadt said: ‘and if we at
Cadillac can’t do it, who can?’.
The only labor to be found in Detroit were superannuated
Negro prostitutes. To everybody’s horror, Nick Dreystadt hired some 2,000 of
them. ‘But hire their madams too’ he said: ‘They know how to manage the women.’
Very few of the women could read and the job required following long
instructions. ‘We don’t have time to teach them to read,’ said Nick, ‘and few
would learn to read anyhow.’
So he went to the workbench and himself machined a dozen of
the bomb-sights. When he knew how to do it, he had a movie camera take a film
of the process. He mounted the film frames separately on a projector and
synchronized them with a flow diagram in which a red light went on to show the
operator what she had already done, a green light for what to do next, and a
yellow light to show what to make sure of before taking the next step. By now
this is standard procedure for a great many assembly processes: it was
Dreystadt who invented it. Within a few weeks these unskilled illiterates were
turning out better work and in larger quantities than highly skilled machinists
had done before.
Throughout GM, and indeed Detroit, Cadillac’s ‘red-light
district’ provoked a good deal of ribald comment. But Dreystadt quickly stopped
it. ‘These women,’ he said, ‘are my fellow workers and yours. They do a good
job and respect their work. Whatever their past, they are entitled to the same
respect as any one of our associates.' The union asked him to promise that the
women would be gone as soon as replacements could be found; the Automobile
Workers Union of those days was led, especially on the local level, largely by
white Fundamentalist Southerners, who did not even want white women as fellow
workers, let alone Negro prostitutes.
Dreystadt knew very well that he would have to lay off most
of the women after the war when the veterans returned and demanded their old
jobs back. But though derided as a ‘nigger lover’ and a ‘whoremonger,’ he tried
hard to get union agreement to save at least a few of the jobs the women held.
‘For the first time in their lives,’ he said, ‘these poor wretches are paid
decently, work in decent conditions, and have some rights. And for the first
time they have some dignity and self-respect. It’s our duty to save them from
being again rejected and despised.' When the war came to an end and the women
had to be discharged, many tried to commit suicide and quite a few succeeded.
Nick Dreystadt sat in his office with his head in his hands, almost in tears.
‘God forgive me,’ he said, ‘I have failed these poor souls.’ “
There is an article by John Steele Gordon in the November
1995 issue of American Heritage magazine about Mr. Dreystadt titled The man who
saved the Cadillac.
The We Can Do It! poster came from Wikimedia Commons.
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