ENGINEERS CAN BE SUPPLANTED BY BOYS AND GIRLS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6886, 16 April 1929, Page 3

ENGINEERS CAN BE SUPPLANTED BY BOYS AND GIRLS

AID OF MODERN MACHINERY It was si a tod in evidence before Judge Beeby, in the Australian Arbitration Court recently, that unskilled labourers ,even boys and girls, can perform the most delicate engineering work with the aid of modern machinery. Mr M. G. Chapman, works manager for for Chapman and Sherack, manufacturers of marine motors, of Erskineville, said that during the war he entered into a contract iu England w'ith the Arm of Vickers ,Limited, to manufacture Maxim machine guns. Ho was were 15,000 hands, and of that number a very small proportion only were skilled mechanics such as he claimed to bo.--Most of the work, and practically all the production work, was carried on in various stages —all by juvenile labour, chiefly girls. He found that the operators had no knowledge of the fundamental principles of the machines they worked. All they knew was how to move a lever and set a machine in motion, and to throw in a feed lever which automatically tropped up when the cutters had passed for the work. Their duty w-as just to try a gauge, which had a very close limit. The w-ork was passed from one girl to another, and so on right along a line of machines until it reached the end of the line a completed piece of work. Strange to say, the rejections after the work had passed through all these unskilled employees w r as only about 3 per cent. The w-itness exhibited the feedbox of a Maxim gun. which, lie pointed out ,was a very complicated piece of machinery. He said that lie would defy any jobbing engineering shop in Australia .to produce it in a jobbing manner. *Yet it had been made by machinery operated by girls. The hex-agon-shaped hole into which went a lever that received the recoil from the gun was roughly three-eighths part of an inch, but not even a ten-thousandth part of an inch variation was allowed., He once saw a girl of 14 years of age,! whom he thought to be too young to j be in the factory, producing the hole with a little machine Balled a I “broaching” machine. ) The operations that the witness saw. in England wore adopted in Australia' at (he Erskineville factory, where sev-|

oral type sof engines were made. There were drilling machines, y with three spindles, which drilled two holes in about a minute. These holes had to be exactly parallel. A man could easily do twenty of them in the machine while one w-as being done on an ordinary lathe.