Dayton fuse plant paid foremen for slowest worker's output, not fastest

0005 inch. Candidates willing to try existed in plenty. The trouble was what happened once they reached the shop floor: new hires who had never seen a machine before froze in terror at their first sight of one, and Works Manager Charles Carpenter watched the most earnest recruits break down and weep rather than attempt the work.

The standard remedy at the time — the article names shipbuilding as the visible failure case — was to put green hands straight onto the line and let them learn from whoever was nearby, sink or swim. It failed doubly here: foremen, paid on their group's total output, had every incentive to simply discharge a slow or frightened worker rather than lose production time coaching her, and untrained hires who did stay learned their neighbors' bad habits and drove up scrap rates.

Separated training with women instructors to disprove 'I could never do that,' and paid foremen on group average so they coached slow learners instead of firing them.

Seeing a woman already running the machine disproves the 'I could never do that' belief before instruction begins.

Paying foremen on group average makes a struggler drag down their own bonus, so coaching her up becomes the fastest route to higher pay.

A calmer trainee is easier for an incentivized foreman to bring up to speed, so the two fixes compound.

Removing the foreman's power to fire removes the easy culling option, forcing them to engage with the struggler.

When capable recruits quit from intimidation, fix the fear trigger and the supervisor's incentive structure together, not just add more training.

On one 56-point-tolerance aluminum fuse-body operation, 31 women averaging 8 pieces an hour in January 1916 rose to over 25 an hour within four weeks of the training department opening and to over 55 an hour once the pipeline matured — nearly a sevenfold gain. In the roughly 2,000-worker assembly department, two independent engineering firms hired to estimate the plant's ceiling put it at 15,000 complete fuses a day across two shifts; trained women assemblers reached 38,000 a day in a single shift, more than double what the outside experts thought the whole plant could produce.