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REVIEW
THE
VOL. IXIX No 16
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., at 373 4th Ave., New York. Oct. 18, 1919
Single Copies 10 Cent*
$2.00 Per Year
Technical Training in the Piano Trade
A
G R E A T deal of ink is being consumed and much white paper covered in the course of arguments
pro and con every aspect of the industrial questions which perplex our industry, even as they also
perplex apparently all industries in the country at the present time.
There is a sound as of many waters, there is much conversation, but very little, indeed, that
can help us out of our perplexities. Moreover, so long as one particular aspect of the matter is overlooked,
the chances are slim that we shall learn anything valuable from any of our would-be prophets and teachers.
That particular aspect of the whole question of industrial unrest refers to technical training for the
individual worker. It is a hugely important and much neglected question.
This industry of ours, at the very moment we write, groans under the most perplexing and apparently
unfillable labor shortage it has ever known. We have no reserve of trained men, and we are making little
progress towards gaining recruits.
Yet it is a fact that, throughout the mass of our factories, the work of the different branches is so nearly
standardized that a finisher, a regulator or a bellyman from any one shop can, at any time, go to work with
scarcely the slightest suspension from difference of method in any other shop.
That is simply another way of saying that there is no great problem of individual specialization any
longer to harass those who are ready to put forth to the trade the project of a training institution for piano
mechanics.
The United States Department of Labor is looking into the matter of vocational training in our industry,
as in many others. It is doing all this because it wishes to help in assuring, during coming years, the inter-
national industrial position of the United States.
The Music Industries Chamber of Commerce has appointed a committee, whose chairman is Richard
W. Lawrence, to investigate and report upon the question of how this industry can organize technical training
for a future supply of skilled workers.
So far the question has been academically treated, although the Government has put forth a skeleton
scheme for the organization of a technical school. But the question is not academic, it is immensely practical,
and decidedly immediate.
We have no reserve of trained men. Our existing trained workers are not (let us admit it) of high
intelligence, generally speaking. Their work is not showing adequate daily progress. There is no shop so
slow as the average piano shop to introduce new methods or scrap old ones.
Production per man is therefore small compared with the scale of other industries one might mention
Therefore, the cost of manufacture is always higher than it might be. Hence, again, the possible earnings
per man are never what they might be.
This is no one's fault. Neither manufacturer nor worker is individually to blame. The fault is with
an antiquated system, to which all alike are bound, and from which the entire industry must be freed before
maximum efficiency can possibly be attained.
No panacea for industrial ills exists. But one effectual remedy for some of the specific ills which affect
our own industry is to be found in organizing technical training.
We need more skilled men, many more of them* with better skill. We need more intelligence. Thus,
and thus alone, we may aim at higher production, higher earnings, higher standards of living for all of those
whose field of activity is found in the music industry.
Let us put our industry on the high plane whereon it truly belongs. Let us work for technical training
on a national scale at the hands of the industry itself.