Word: man-hour
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Model for Laggards. In some cases great improvement has resulted from a change of methods, without any new machines. A textile mill in Bolton rearranged the machines in its cardroom, set workers to acquiring high skill at one job instead of puttering at several. Production per man-hour went up 39%, cost went down 10% a pound, and workers had more free time (for tea, etc.) on the job. Yet in the textile industry as a whole the man-hour output remains abysmally...
With these figures MacGowan's statistics-jugglers thought they had the key to job opportunities. Allowing for a 6% increase in man-hour productive efficiency since 1939, they reasoned that the manpower needed to produce 1947's manufactured goods will be 13.4 million-a 34% increase over the ten million on manufacturers' payrolls in 1939. By applying and revising 1939's ratio of industrial workers to workers in all other categories -i.e., agriculture, distribution, and service industries-they reached the figure of 53.5 million jobs...
...Worked out a reorganization of the Army Air Forces' administrative opera tions (resulting at some fields in man-hour savings of as much as 25%), proposed similar internal improvements for a dozen other war agencies, ironed out many a conflict...
...difficulty: manpower. Even though 75% of laundry workers were always women, no laundry now knows from one day to the next how many employes will appear for work. Labor turn over has run as high as 500% a year; inefficient workers have halved the laundry's output per man-hour while doubling the number of customers' complaints. Even if laundries were allowed to raise wages they could not compete with the higher wages paid by war industry...
...last week's end, the U.S. War Labor Board announced that preliminary estimates for both war and nonwar industries indicated a total of 3,000 work stoppages, involving a loss of 4,565,000 man-days. On the basis of an 8-hr, day, U.S. man-hour losses would therefore be about 36,520,000. With the U.S. population roughly three times greater, U.S. man-hour losses due to strikes closely approximated Great Britain...