The skilled-labor bottleneck behind Liberty ship production

In 1939 the major American yards contained fewer than 20,000 skilled workers, while many smaller yards deliberately kept their expensive skilled nucleus small and surrounded it with untrained assistants. The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 and the Maritime Commission it created were meant to address this weakness, yet after three years the commission had diagnosed more than solved the problem. It initially imagined sophisticated turbine-powered merchant ships, but those designs assumed a depth of craft labor that did not exist. Kaiser would soon advertise for 20,000 workers, a number comparable to the entire prewar skilled shipbuilding workforce, making design for inexperienced labor a strategic requirement rather than a secondary economy.