The Pittsburgh Press (January 22, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PORTLAND, Ore. – The Willamette Iron & Steel Corp. is 75 years old, and it had never built a ship in its life. But it’s building them now, all right.
Two years ago it had 60 men working for it. Today the number is crowding 4000. That’s the way things go when you have a war. You can do what you gotta do.
Most of the shipyard workers at Willamette had never built a ship before either. They are green hands who are learning the business, under a cadre of experienced shipbuilders.
They learn pretty fast. Suppose you start as a helper. If you’ve got pretty good sense and try hard, you can be a welder or riveter in four or five months. And your pay jumps from 87 cents an hour to $1.12.
All winter I’ve been hearing yarns about the fantastic wages that ex-gas-pumpers were making in the shipyards. Stories about boys who’d never made $20 a week in their lives, now drawing down all the way from $80 to $150 a week.
I asked about it out at Willamette. They said nonsense. They said their scale was as high as any, but that the most even a highly skilled and long-experienced artisan could make, even with overtime, would be about $112 a week.
For the average journeyman mechanic it would be possible to make $100 in a week by working the regular 10-hour shift for six days, and all day Sunday at double time.
The young ex-delivery boy, working the same hours, could make a maximum of $78.30. His average weekly wage is actually below $60 (of course that ain’t hay).
Men work 10-hour shifts
At Willamette they work two 10-hour shifts – finding they get more done that way than in three eight-hour shifts. The men work six days a week, 60 hours. The first 40 hours are on straight time; the extra 20 on time and a half. And if they work on Sundays or holidays, they get double time.
The work is hard, but so is a lot of work. It is terribly noisy; in fact the din of riveting would drive me to the bughouse. It is chilly and miserable in winter weather, but fortunately, the northwest doesn’t have much really tough winter weather.
During blackouts, work stops completely and all lights go off. The men don’t leave, but sit right where they were. That’s partly because it would be dangerous to clamber around in the dark, and partly so no time will be lost when the lights go on.
The sight of a huge ship being built wasn’t as thrilling as I had thought it would be. It’s just sort of like building a house – using steel plates instead of board siding.
They start at the bottom and just keep riveting or welding on plates, building up a story at a time, until they get to the top. They put in cross-plates as they go along, making the thing into rooms, you might say. The ship is really just an unspeakable number of cells, riveted together, if you look at it in the simplest way.
Navy wants still more speed
The really interesting part comes after the ship is launched, when the ship-fitters start putting in all the gadgets. It takes just as long to finish a ship inside, after it’s in the water, as it does to build it from nothing up to launching time.
Friends tell me it is traditional that shipyard workers loaf. I had never heard this before, but I watched anyhow. It didn’t appear to me that anybody was about to keel over from the mad pace, but I didn’t see any actual loafing.
For one thing, you don’t look awfully busy while you’re building a ship. You have to spend a lot of time twisting through little openings, and fitting plates together, and adjusting your tools. It isn’t as though you were supposed to be running up and down, waving and yelling.
The ships here now are running several months ahead of schedule, and I remarked that the Navy must be very pleased.
“Not especially,” was the answer. “Our schedule was set pretty loose to begin with, because we were inexperienced. And anyhow the Navy isn’t satisfied nowadays with your speed, no matter how fast you go. And that’s the way it should be.”
This rather staid old ironworks, which for three-quarters of a century has turned out heavy castings in a great, dark, dirt-floored, hangar-like shed, has now mushroomed and spread all in a year until it teems like a beehive. To the oldsters in the works, it seems incredible that it could have happened at all.
Yet I asked the president what would happen if they got word from the Navy tonight, exactly doubling their contract. Could they get the men, could they handle the confusion of building more shipways, could they expand rapidly enough to make a go of it?
Easily, was the answer. In fact, they more or less anticipate a huge new load before long.