Yard employees worked in 17 trade shops, the names of which characterized the needs of modern steel shipbuilding: Shipfitters (including riveters, drillers, welders, sheet metal workers); Electrical; Pattern (for cast metals); Chain; Copper/Pipefitting; and other skills employed in raising a steel ship.
Some of the old familiar shops survived in reduced or altered roles. The sail loft now produced mostly canvas bags, pea jackets, and hammocks. The riggers loft had become a versatile shop responsible for an array of shipyard tasks. They still worked aloft on stacks and steel masts; directed dry docking and crane operations; prepared shipways for launchings; dove beneath ships in hardhat diving suits; and continued to do the traditional rigger’s handiwork, such as the braided rope fenders that protected ships’ hulls and the fancy leatherwork and ropework still common on naval vessels. The workers in the joiner shop worked on the small wooden boats built at the yard, but spent much of their time making shipboard furniture. The ropewalk continued to turn out the large quantities of rope still needed on steel ships.
These young women were working as civilian clerks for the Navy when the U.S. entered World War I. Overnight they became Yeomen-F (female) naval personnel. (Yeomen is the naval term for clerical workers.)
Joiners were skilled workers in wood and traditionally the elite of the yard workforce. Even in the early days of steel ships, they remained among the highest paid of the workers. Here joiners are photographed in their shop, about 1897.
Yard’s floating crane, shown here in 1913, could lift 150 tons. Dry Dock 1 is visible in left background.
The traditional shipyard hierarchy was virtually unchanged: the crews of mechanics, apprentices, and laborers were headed by leadingmen; several leadingmen were supervised by quartermen; and the quartermen were under a chief quarterman or they answered directly to the master who headed the shop.
Unlike the hard times of the 1880s, the employees at Charlestown had reason to feel secure. Civil Service reforms of the ’90s had already gone a long way toward making merit, not political advantage, the criterion for hiring and firing. And now, in the hour of war, the Navy wanted to keep its shipyard workers. In the months before the United States entered the conflict, officials had worried that employees swept up in the popular sentiment for preparedness would enlist. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels declared it the “patriotic duty” of the workers to remain at the yard, asserting that “their services to their country ... [are] as important as if they were actually in the field.”