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Training
Over the year when Chance Vought Aircraft moved to Texas, 6,500 new employees gradually entered the company. They were expected to carry on a smooth production of airplanes and to handle the receiving end of a gigantic move. They had to fill the shoes of 6,500 skilled and experienced workers. The ramifications of an aircraft manufacturing firm, added to the unique situation brought about by the move, made a simple, uniform training program impossible. Everyone, whether transferred from Stratford or hired in Dallas, had something to learn. Length of courses ranged from two hours to one year. Students in one section of the training program pondered the latest problem in aerodynamics. Others learned what a “Texas Blue Norther” is.
At the middle of May, just after the decision had been made to move the plant to Texas, R. E. Erickson, who had been supervisor of education for North American Aviation and had set up a program of personnel management for the Air Force, was chosen to head up a training program. A desk was set up in the great, empty hulk of factory, and initial plans were laid for building a training organization. The first actual job of training to be done in the plant involved a class of 22 young Dallas men, who had been chosen as employment interviewers and job analysts. This class began on 22 May, just over a month after the announcement of the move. Lectures by personnel men, instructors in shop skills, and others, familiarized the interviewers with the company and its policies, and with the jobs that the people hired would have to do. Once the employment interviewers were at work, and the various departments began to require personnel, the needs for training became well defined. The move schedule provided that detail parts production should be the first activity completed at Stratford and the first begun at Dallas. Lathes, drills, grinders, and sheet metal equipment for training were among the first articles shipped. The plant machine shop was growing and, with it, the need for skilled machinists. The first shop skills class was formed on June 21. In recruiting machine shop personnel, the same problem, in a lesser degree, was encountered by Chance Vought as had confronted many expanding aircraft plants during the war. Aircraft manufacture requires a high quality of precision machine and sheet metal work, and hence, a high degree of skill in the machinist and sheet metal worker. Although it was losing much of the famed New England craftsmanship by its move from Stratford to Dallas, Chance Vought had three advantages that the wartime industries did not have. First, the war plants in and around Dallas had trained a pool of experienced aircraft workers; second, supervisory personnel were being transferred from Stratford to Dallas; and third, there was more time to train personnel. On the other hand, there was the fact that shop personnel had to be better trained than during the war. Aircraft of a single type had been produced then in great volume. With several thousand units of one part to be turned out, a shop man could be trained to perform one operation. His job, perhaps, would be to drill a single hole in a single part time after time, using the same machine, performing the same operation. He could be trained in two or three weeks. Nowadays, an aircraft worker must be more versatile. With Chance Vought’s production schedule of an order of Corsairs to be built, a contract for F6U Pirates, and a number of F7U Cutlasses, a man had to be prepared to perform a number of operations on a given part. He might have to work on a variety of machines, or do a number of forming, assembly and riveting operations in sheet metal.
The faculty of the first shop skills class consisted of eight highly skilled shop men drawn from the Stratford plant, who outlined a course of instruction. Typical of the New England craftsmen who guided the new Texas trainees was John Pederson, who had trained five years in Denmark, had attended technical school six nights a week while working, and then had studied draftsmanship in the Technological Institute in Copenhagen. He had worked for decades as a machinist in every field in the business, from locomotive building to experimental aircraft instruments that had to be machined under a magnifying glass. He was not only skilled as a machinist but as an instructor. In Denmark, it had been part of a journeyman’s work to train two apprentices. Bob Thompson, from the Stratford plant, was made supervisor of the shop skills training program. Two Texas men were put in charge of the training for sheet metal and machine shop workers. Curly Jones, who had been general foreman of the North American sheet metal shop and had assisted in setting up the training program for the AT6, headed the sheet metal division. Frank Haynes, who had begun to learn the machinist trade at age 16, and who had a master’s degree in engineering, led the machine shop training. Other skilled Texans, most of whom had been general foremen in Texas aircraft plants, joined the eight men from Stratford as instructors. Although some experienced labor was available in the Dallas area, it was estimated that some 1600 men would have to be trained from scratch. The shop skills course, as outlined by the Stratford instructors, lasted three months. As peak employment was to be reached a year after the move started, an average of 400 men had to be trained at once in the shop skills program. At one time, toward the beginning of the move, Chance Vought made use of the North Texas A & M College Engineering shop.
Working in two shifts, the trainees had a thorough and careful training experience. Just as the production department of the plant had a quality product to turn out, the shop skills training classes had to turn out skilled personnel, and to turn them out efficiently and economically. Men entering the training came from many fields. There were musicians, former mechanics who needed a brush-up, grocery clerks, salesmen, carpenters, photographers, printers, service station attendants, oil field drillers, typists, bookkeepers, delivery boys, painters, farmers, lawyers and street car operators. There were a few who had never worked before. Most were veterans, with families and responsibilities, eager to learn a lifetime trade in a large, stable industry new in Texas. Instructors found their interest and enthusiasm a good substitute for the craftsmanship handed down from generation to generation in New England. The men trained for the new Chance Vought plant were specialists, as one New England instructor put it, in that they had not learned the machinist’s and metalworker’s trades as children through years of apprenticeship in all fields of the business, they were, unlike well-trained workers, “All-round” specialists. When they had finished their training, they would go into any of Chance Vought’s machine shop or sheet metal departments, as the demands of the various units dictated, and there would receive further individual training for their specific jobs. To the big job of training men in the shop skills, there was added the problem that the experienced workers coming from Connecticut had to adjust themselves to a new kind of life in a new part of the country. There was also the fact that Chance Vought was a firm steeped in New England policies, organization and working habits, and that a large body of Texans must be indoctrinated in these policies. To meet these problems, a two-way orientation program was developed. Transferees from Stratford, not only the workers, but their wives and children as well, came to class at the plant upon arrival to learn about Texas. They got the answers to questions frequently asked by newcomers to Texas. They learned that the phrase “Sunday week” meant a week from Sunday, and that any time after noon is “evening” in Texas. They learned of such sectional differences as segregation, to make no predictions about the weather, and of the characteristics of friendly, exuberant Texans. Erickson told the new arrivals not to be suspicious of their amiable neighbors. “One of the first things you will notice about Texas people,” he explained, “is their spirit of friendliness and willingness to offer assistance or help and even offer material things immediately after first acquaintance. If someone from New York City, for example, were that friendly on first acquaintance, you could be sure that the next offer would be to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. Well, you don’t have to worry about that sort of ulterior motive here in Texas. I can assure you from my own experience over a nine-year period that a Texan’s show of friendship is really genuine and can be depended upon.”
Conversely, the Texans had to learn about New England. An orientation course presented by Paul Goff, a Texan, taught all new employees about the company’s history, its products, its wage and salary policies, its rules, officers and organizational make-up. All details that might confuse a new employee were cleared up in the Texas orientation lecture. There were details that needed further elaboration for other workers. Girls in the office, for example, who handled a myriad of strange forms, had to learn the correct procedures for filling them out and routing them. They had to be familiarized with the firm’s correspondence and other details. Stratford clerical workers pitched in and helped set up a course in clerical procedures, the first of its kind ever presented by Chance Vought Aircraft. Taking in eight classroom sessions, the classes were limited to sixteen girls each. The clerical procedures course was redesigned and presented to engineering clerical employees, with special emphasis on the specialized forms used in their departments.
Chance Vought also dusted off and enlarged an engineering training program to replace the engineers that it had lost during the move. Before the war, they had taken in groups of 6 or 8 men to train in their manufacturing and engineering methods. In 1947, this program was expanded to take in 25 men per year, chosen by engineering personnel men through interviews with 1000 students on 60 different campuses. With this broad educational program for employees in all phases of work, Chance Vought successfully bridged the gap between Stratford and Dallas. Its new employees, skillfully trained, took over where the old ones left off. Through the comprehensive picture their training gave them of the company as a whole, its policies, products, and operations, each new employee could see where he fitted in. So the famed Chance Vought teamwork carried over into its Texas employees. Through the stimulus of helping the new employees into their jobs, the transferred employees, too, developed a heightened esprit-de-corps, and the hoped-for peak efficiency and quality in output was an inevitable result of Chance Vought’s move to Texas.
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