Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
THE
REVIEW
ffUSIC TIRADE
VOL. LXXVIII. No. 9 PiblUhed Every Satirday. Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., 383 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.
£
Mar. 1, 1924
Sln
o
*ll,£
£«" 1° c * nta
$2.00 Per Year
iiiiiliniiiiniiiiiiiiiMiiiii
Developing the Piano Factory Productive Force
liaillKll[KlllKli!K!!lKW
E
VERY so often the attention of the piano industry, either through local or national associations, is
brought to the vital need for some organized system of vocational training" in the industry to provide a
supply of efficient trained workmen, not only to take the places of those workers who for one reason
or another have dropped out of the field, but also to make possible increased production of instruments
as it is made necessary by growing demand.
This matter of vocational training has come up frequently and has been discussed pro and con at length.
Committees have been appointed to investigate and report, and, having reported, have gone their ways serenely
with the problem still unsolved except in individual cases and generally through individual effort as manufac-
turers have handled it themselves.
After experience of years, there are those manufacturers who have seen the light and who have realized
that the problem of keeping their factories manned as fully as possible w T as not so much a matter of association
discussion as of prompt action even though such action meant a considerable expenditure of time and money.
The result has been that a number of manufacturers have put into effect an organized system of train-
ing workers which, as a general rule, has worked out satisfactorily, giving them working forces sufficient to
take care of normal requirements.
One concern faced with the question of getting skilled labor brought together a hundred or more outside
workers, some of them men skilled in various branches of the woodworking or cabinet finishing trades and
spent some months training them in handling the special requirements of piano factory work. The procedure
was expensive but results were definite, and it is a question whether any money at all could have been saved by
letting things take their course and waiting weeks and perhaps months to gather together a score or two of
workers trained especially in piano building.
The great trouble has been that many manufacturers, particularly of the older school, have clung to the
conclusion that piano making is for the most part a highly specialized trade from the standpoint of the worker,
neglecting to realize that, though specialists are both necessary and desirable in certain departments, there are
a number of phases of the work which can be well and acceptably handled by an intelligent worker experienced
in the use of tools after a comparatively brief period of instruction.
There have been manufacturers who have decried the tendency of youths to desert their factories after
one or several years of training at the manufacturer's expense, either going to competing concerns with the
status of class A workmen, or entering other fields where compensation was larger than in piano factories
although the period of employment might be less regular.
The manufacturers who have gone into the question of building up new organizations have found that
this tendency to secure training at the expense of one manufacturer and then selling the knowledge to another
does not exist in the case of the worker who has been trained in woodworking or case finishing in some other
field and enters the piano factory because he knows what his labor is worth on the market and is interested in
the wages offered and paid by the piano manufacturer. That there is an appeal to workers in other trades was
evidenced recently by the experience of a piano manufacturer who, after advertising several times and with in-
different results for workers specializing in one or another of the various departments of piano making, gave
up his hope in that direction and advertised for men experienced in woodworking and furniture finishing.
Although the labor market was low at the time, he secured a very substantial number of applicants and from
among them a sufficient number of workers for his needs. It took several weeks to train them in the details of
piano making, but he had also waited several weeks to get them.
Vocational training as a recognized trade practice is to be viewed with interest, but it is the manufac-
turer who gets his own people and does his own training that is keeping his plant properly manned.