Women's "Weakness" Changes Workplaces

Better rivet guns for the Janes who made the planes

I am nearing my due date, which means it’s a good time for pleasure reading. In particular

Construction Physics

’s longread on the scaling up of the American warplane industry during WWII.

Its a wild story about state capacity ("Not only is this [325,000 planes] more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined produced during [WWII] — it’s also more aircraft than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation.").

But it also turns out to be a germane-to-Other Feminisms story. To scale up plane production that much, that fast, the American government and the aviation industry needing to think differently about how to maximize their inputs. That didn’t just mean sourcing steel, but sourcing a very different genre of workers: women.

To accommodate inexperienced female factory workers, a variety of changes were implemented. Processes were broken down into simple steps that unskilled workers could do. Part tolerances were relaxed where possible. Tasks were rearranged to be less physically taxing, and aids like trunnion jigs, which parts could be mounted to and freely rotated, were more widely adopted. Tools were redesigned to make them easier to use. Rivet guns, for instance, were redesigned to have counterbalances, which not only reduced the strength required to use them but made it possible to rivet with a single worker where it had previously required two. These redesigns not only made it possible to use women and other unskilled laborers, but also simplified and streamlined the production process — factory managers realized that if a women could do a job swiftly and easily, a man could too, and “practically every job in the catalog was revolutionized”.

When the factory had its pick of workers, the machines didn’t have to be as forgiving or adaptable. The company could accept some inefficiency because it was cheap to ask large, strong men to do it the hard way.

In this case, having women enter the workforce with our intrinsic limitations, prompted redesigns that didn’t just accommodate women, but reduced some burdens that men had borne unnecessarily.

In reading this story, I was reminded of the way the Bruderhof have designed their factory. The Anabaptist community holds their goods in common and all share in the revenue of the classroom furniture they produce for the outside world. Their factory draws on their community, not from the set of all workers who live within commuting distance.

That means they designed their production line with the assumption that some of the workers will not be “prime” workers. Some will be elderly, some will have limited mobility, some will have developmental delays, some will need to work sitting and for shorter shifts. I visited their factory floor, and I could see the way the whole assembly line was built around a range of capacities, not just a set of necessary tasks.

They’ve specifically chosen to forgo some forms of efficiency when it changed the nature of the work and the way workers shared it. As reported by the NYT, they added programmable routers and were able to manufacture more quickly and accept more orders. But that didn’t serve the community as a whole.

“We felt like the business was running us, rather than we running the business,” said John Rhodes, the factory’s manager at the time. Mr. Rhodes, 72, is now a community business consultant and a teacher at the Bruderhof-run private high school, the Mount Academy, in Esopus, N.Y.

“The automation was having a bad influence on our young men, who should be working with their hands more,” he said. “But they were just stuck behind their computers programming the routers.”

The workers decided to scrap the routers and return to their earlier, more labor-intensive manual assembly line. Profits plummeted. It was a sacrifice the community was happy to make.

These factories are outliers. In the case of the Bruderhof, the factory has made a commitment to steward a particular community, not just spend its members as inputs. During WWII, the factories had not choice but to employ a broader base of workers than they would have chosen if they could skim the cream.

But the two stories make me curious about where employers are proactively seeking out “unusual” or “undesirable” workers and seeing what their work process looks like when designed around someone else. I think I’ve seen this most often in employment for adults with developmental disabilities (I’ve visited several coffee shops/restaurants built around this idea).

I’m also curious to what extent work-from-home/flextime parents have played this role, especially post-pandemic. Like the women who needed counterbalanced rivet guns, parents (of both sexes, but particularly women) are likely to need an adjustment which may turn out to be a blessing for all the workers.

Where have you seen a company deliberately plan work to accommodate a broader range of workers?

Where have you seen a “non-standard” worker win an accommodation that benefited others?