THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



185 



employees, and the third, who is the 

 chairman, the United States Employment 

 Service. 



It is the purpose of these boards to 

 supervise the recruiting and the distribu- 

 tion of workers for war production. If 

 they fulfill their important mission, it is 

 hoped that they will be able to counteract 

 one of the abuses in the shipyards of 

 which many executives are complaining — 

 the practice of one yard endeavoring to 

 induce another yard's workers to leave 

 their present employer and join the forces 

 of the proselyting plant. This practice 

 has become so flagrant in some communi- 

 ties that the heads of industrial relations 

 departments find it necessary to keep 

 secret-service men stationed at their own 

 gates in order to detect the employment 

 agents of rival concerns. In several 

 places incipient riots have been narrowly 

 averted as the result of these practices. 



MAINTAINING MORALE IN THE SHIPYARDS 



After workmen have been mobilized 

 from non-essential occupations and dis- 

 patched to the shipyards, one of the most 

 important tasks of the Emergency Fleet 

 Corporation is to induce the men to con- 

 tinue on their jobs, working with 100 per 

 cent efficiency — in other words, to incul- 

 cate and maintain morale in the plants. 



Every important yard in the country 

 today has its director of industrial rela- 

 tions — the man who is responsible for the 

 morale of the men. Upon the shoulders 

 of no Other individual in a yard rests a 

 greater responsibility than upon this di- 

 rector. 



He employs a thousand devices to add 

 to the comfort and insure the content- 

 ment of his men and to spur them on 

 to the greatest possible effort. The four- 

 minute patriotic speakers ; the concerts by 

 a band composed of shipyard workers ; 

 the admirably edited and attractively il- 

 lustrated weekly newspaper, issued at all 

 of the larger yards and distributed gratis 

 among the men ; the ably managed cafe- 

 teria; the completely equipped grocery 

 store, where foodstuffs may be purchased 

 at the smallest possible margin above 

 wholesale cost; the hospital equipment 

 and the sustained effort to inculcate the 

 principle of safety first ; the efficiency and 

 courtesy of the uniformed military police, 



who protect the yard from criminal out- 

 rages of enemy aliens ; the detective force, 

 ever vigilant to discover the first signs of 

 insidious enemy propaganda or sabotage 

 among the men — all these and many more 

 are cares which directly or indirectly are 

 the responsibility of the head of the in- 

 dustrial relations department. 



Charles M. Schwab is an industrial re- 

 lations man. His official title is Director 

 General of the Emergency Fleet Corpora- 

 tion ; but it is due not so much to his 

 ability as a "captain of industry," in the 

 sense of an office organizer, that America 

 is indebted for the immediate success 

 which signalized his entrance into the 

 work of building the nation's ships. It 

 is to his flashing genius as a creator of 

 morale among workingmen, of whom he 

 was once one, that we owe much of the 

 rapid advance of the building program. 



When the history of America's titanic 

 efforts as a shipbuilding nation in time 

 of war comes to be written, the broad and 

 unselfish vision which prompted Edward 

 N. Hurley, chairman of the Shipping 

 Board, to choose a colaborer of Mr. 

 Schwab's caliber for head of the Emer- 

 gency Fleet Corporation, will command 

 universal admiration. Instead of divid- 

 ing the glory of the accomplished task 

 between them, Mr. Hurley and Mr. 

 Schwab multiply it, for the work of each 

 is equally essential to complete fulfill- 

 ment of the country's needs. 



CUTTING DOWN THE TURN-OVER 



One of the most serious problems 

 which has been encountered in the effort 

 to maintain and elevate the morale of the 

 shipyard workers has been the enormous 

 change in the personnel of the working 

 force from week to week — the turn-over, 

 as it is called. At one time, at the Hog 

 Island plant — the largest shipyard in the 

 world, with its 50 ways, employing more 

 than 30,000 workmen — more than seven 

 times as many new laborers were en- 

 rolled each week as remained on the pay- 

 roll on Saturday night. Not only was 

 this vast shifting army of so-called work- 

 ers demoralizing to the men who could 

 be induced to remain on the job, but they 

 constituted a discontented crew, spread- 

 ing throughout the land a tale of dissat- 

 isfaction which kept other workers from 



