Transcript

Location: 1401 St. Andrews St.

Ronald Barnes: Being in industrial engineering, you were on the factory floor a lot. And it was quite difficult because at the time I knew what a bargaining unit was—a union. And many individuals in the plant were always skeptical of somebody coming around and writing up their operation, their job, or standing there with a stopwatch. 

La Crosse Rubber Mills instituted a incentive system in the mid—in the late 30s. But it was upgraded during the World War II. And I had the privilege in the upgrading in the department to work with two, uh, industrial engineers and one of them was from the University of Iowa. So I spent three different sessions with him, as far as learning the, uh, background of industrial engineering, the, uh, plant layout, everything from work simplification to the actual time study, the setting of standards, and the following of the, uh, efficiencies of these standards. At that time, we tried to, uh, say that we’ll have, someday, from 88-92% of our direct labor on the incentive system. And that was realized, probably, 4 or 5 years later. And I was proud to be a part of that because it was quite a celebration. 

Maintaining this incentive system, as I learned then, and years later, was not easy. In the, uh, footwear industry, uh, there is a constant change of different types of shoes. And at that time—I won’t go into different manufacturing of the types—but there were always changes. There were people complaining about their standards. And one of the things we learned: we better listen to the bargaining unit people, because, after all, they made the place go. 

The incentive system that I tried to control was definitely most interesting because we were always looking for those people who were not producing and those who were high efficiency people. And we were interested in one thing and that’s the quality in the workplace and had to have constant follow up.

Our goal, always, was to keep up with the workflow on the floor, department to department. Each department at the time was department seniority. And, uh, our main purpose was, when an operation changed, you were supposedly to go out there with a stopwatch to see if there was a procedure in the past that was comparable to that. You were always worried about the standard. The standard meant that if you were assembling insoles in a particular department in a very, very—maybe a five-element job, something as simple as that—would it change? And you were always trying to save the little worker—do anything to, uh, disrupt the procedure—to shortcut. And that was one of the most feared things in industrial engineering with an incentive system. You were always out there looking at the workplace to see if there was a better way. But yet we had to be careful because the union, uh, contract stated that once the standard is accepted by the union, why, uh, we weren’t supposed to change it, see? But the interesting thing was setting the, uh, standard by, uh, stopwatch time study, or a hundred decimal watch. And the most difficult thing in training as an industrial engineer with an incentive system, or a straight-day work, or a flat rate system, is that you have to rate for effort. You time the job, break it down by elements, and you assume you can tell, within seven to ten percent, of what that person is working at. We had what was called a straight hundred percent piecework plan, where, if it took one minute for this element, and you say, “Well, gee, this could be done in half the time,” or something. But overall, you usually had the person that was skilled on the job. That was one thing we demanded. It wasn’t somebody just off the street, that they had to be somewhat skilled.

In all of these years after that I guess the stress factor, uhm, was more and more evident in my life and my wife insisted that I had to get out of the department. And yet the memories in the factory were, uh, great and will never leave me and all the wonderful people I met.