Word: detroit
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...years ago. The issue: whether autoworkers or their bosses shall decide how fast production lines move, i.e., how many cars and parts are produced in a given time. Speedy, timed, mass production is what makes motor cars cheap and plentiful in the U. S. So the battle in Detroit was of as much interest to automobile buyers as to the motormakers, their 380,000 workers, and the furnishers of steel, rubber, plate glass, etc., etc., who pine or prosper with their biggest consumer...
...battle began at Chrysler Corp.'s Dodge plant in Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb noted for its putrescent politics and its high proportion (90%) of Polish-Americans. As 1940 Dodges took shape on the assembly lines, company inspectors time & again had to halt the production flow to check up on botched work, missing parts. Harassed Dodge bosses were up against a new flowering of an old technique-the slowdown. After Dodge fired 64 union sloths, then refused to reinstate them, every second unit slid untouched past key workers. Union girls refused to touch De Soto arm rests on a parts...
...Press Agent Ivy Lee (whom Laborites still remember as "Poison Ivy"). To the press and to dealers facing a shortage of cars at the start of their new season, Chrysler's President K. T. Keller sent a letter: "We are getting practically no production from any of our Detroit plants. . . . You cannot run a business on a sound basis and produce quality automobiles if men . . . take into their own hands the running of the plants." To bulbous, loud Richard Frankensteen of C. I. O.'s United Automobile Workers, Chrysler's Vice President Herman Weckler also addressed...
...pocket: convivial, pianoplaying, 33-year-old Winston Weidner Kratz. He ran it on a shoestring for months with outdated Stinson tri-motors. The line was a natural. From a TWA connection at St. Louis it ran to Cincinnati, crossed TWA again at Dayton, and continued north to Toledo and Detroit. But until CAA gave it a certificate of convenience and necessity it was not an airline entity, had no sales value. Loudest to shout against a certificate for Marquette was naturally Jack Frye's TWA which wanted no newcomer in the field it hoped eventually to develop. When...
...Steel production rose from 88.6% to 90.3%. The Great Lakes division of efficient, profitable National Steel (which has a tonnage production monopoly in Detroit) had to close one of its 16 open-hearth steel ingot furnaces for too long deferred repairs. New York's Journal of Commerce commented sagely: ". . . May be a forerunner of a general condition in the industry...