Major Employers During WWII?

[sabrina]

What were some of the major employers (vehicle, distributing, miscellany) pre- and during WWII? Just throw some out there. I need to choose one to research for the current chapter.

 

[Colin1]

Packard

 

[Amsel]

Brown and Root in the Houston ship channel built a shipyard and US Navy vessels including destroyers. Brown and Root also built the Corpus Christi Naval Station during the war. They employed and still do, many people in Southeast Texas.

 

[evangilder]

Anything to do with manufacturing war material, or transportation. Think of how much was transported via rail in those days. There were no interstate highways, so the fastest way to get men an material across country was by rail.

 

[syscom3]

"Kaiser" employed 10's of thousands in the shipyards. Same with the major shipyards on the east coast with the likes of Bethlehem Steel, US Steel, Republic Steel being major builders or suppliers.

GM employed 100's of thousands in a multitude of war plants. The same with Ford and Chrysler.

Douglas Aircraft and Boeing also employed 10's of thousands in aircraft plants.

 

[Colin1]

So
transport and distribution of already-manufactured war material. Sorry, guess I misunderstood the question

 

[Kiwikid]

General Electric Corporation through it's subsidiary GEI was the biggest US employer in the Nazi armaments industry.

GEC owned AEG and OSRAM which both employed slave labour from Nazi concentration camps. Through ownership of AEG, GEC also owned EMW which developed the V-2 rocket.

GEC raised Wall Street loans to it's subsidiary GEI for a light bulb factory, but diverted funds through Lisbon and Switzerland to fund building the Mittlewerk V-2 factory.

During the war GEC also profiteered from a Tungsten Carbide licensing partnership with Krupp Industry. Through subsidiary Carballoy GEC charged the Allies ten times more for Tungsten Carbide exports from Portugal than it charged to the Axis powers.

GEC also made extremely large cash donations to the Nazi party beginning in 1939. Through meetings with Werner von Braun and General Dornberger GEC purchased information for the WAC Corporal project under a scheme called Project ORDCIT.

 

[Kiwikid]

General Motors must have made a heap from building tanks ?

Kaiser shipyards would have made a fortune with shipyards churning out Liberty ships ?

Boeing grew fat on the B-17 and B-29.

 

[Amsel]

Kellogg Brown Root, Inc. -- Company History

Securing Contracts in the 1930s and 1940s

Despite the promising beginning that Brown Root had shown during the 1920s, two calamities struck at the end of the decade which had a profound effect on the company. In 1929, Dan Root, Herman and George Brown's brother-in-law, died, the same year that the stock market crash precipitated the Great Depression, sending the country into a deleterious decade-long economic slide. The death of Root, who had been instrumental in the formation of the company ten years earlier, caused the company to take stock of its situation. The Brown brothers purchased Root's interest in the company and then incorporated as Brown Root, Inc. that same year, marking a new beginning for the company on the eve of the devastating economic climate of the 1930s.

With the onset of the depression, the number of state-funded construction projects slowed to a trickle, forcing the two brothers to pursue other work, including hauling garbage for the city of Houston. However, Brown Root was able to escape from the grip of the depression in a relatively short time, securing a contract in 1934 for the construction of a board road for Humble Oil Company in Roanoke, Louisiana. The contract was significant for two reasons: first, it extended the company's geographic presence from Texas into Louisiana, and second, it formed the first connection with a company that 30 years later would purchase Brown Root. Humble Oil, the client for Brown Root's board road contract, was one of seven major oil companies that owned a company then known as Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company. This business was later renamed the Halliburton Company, and it would become the parent company of Brown Root in the 1960s.

Of more immediate significance to the two brothers, though, was a project awarded to the company in 1936, when Brown Root secured the construction contract for the Marshall Ford Dam. This venture marked the company's entry into heavy construction and the power industry and proved to be a defining moment in the company's history. Located west of Austin, the Marshall Ford Dam, later renamed the Mansfield Dam, would become the largest structure of its kind in Texas, measuring nearly a mile wide and standing 25 stories high. This project, which lasted five years and took two million tons of concrete to complete, elevated Brown Root's status from that of a constructor of moderately sized projects to a company capable of taking on the largest types of construction projects in the world.

The success of the Marshall Dam project led to more large-scale, government-funded work four years later when Brown Root was awarded a contract to help build a $90-million naval air station at Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1940. The construction of the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station was prompted by the looming threat of World War II, and as the United States took steps toward entering the conflict, Brown Root unexpectedly found itself at the center of the government's plans for armament. In addition to the Corpus Christi project, the U.S. Navy approached George Brown in 1941 about taking over the contract to build four submarine chasers, a venture that would pay the company $640,000 for each vessel. Similar to the company's early years, Brown Root was faced with a project that called for skills that it did not possess.

With no previous experience in ship building, the Brown brothers formed Brown Shipbuilding Company and began work on the four submarine chasers stipulated in the Navy contract. Their marked success with the first four led to a contract for four additional submarine chasers, then 12 more, finally resulting in an order in early 1942 for a medium-sized fleet of destroyer escorts which yielded Brown Root $3.3 million for each ship. By the end of the war, George and Herman Brown's uncertain foray into ship building had resulted in 359 combat ships, 12 pursuit craft, 307 landing craft, 36 rocket-firing boats, and four salvage boats being constructed for the U.S. Navy, a production total worth $500 million.

Brown Root emerged from the war as a major U.S. construction company. Its success with the Marshall Ford Dam, the Corpus Christi Naval Station, and its impressive wartime work had propelled the company into the upper echelon of the country's construction firms, a remarkable achievement for a business that as recently as 20 years earlier was subsisting on constructing wooden roads to support oil field work.

 

[Graeme]

Douglas Aircraft and Boeing also employed 10's of thousands in aircraft plants.

Just read that the peak workforce for Curtiss in 1942 was 42,000.

 

[pbfoot]

Beyween Curtiss and Bell aircraft in Niagara Falls/Buffalo there were 50,000 workers but I think the claim to fame here was the Electrochemical industry or abrasives chances are if you had a grinding wheel or any abrasive tool in North America it was made in Niagara , IMHO the most important industry in WW2 without abrasives you have no tools or machine capabilty