Plenty of jobs today. But will the employment window slam-shut with a sickening bang when the war and the production boom end? Many a worker would be happier if he knew his job would last a year or more past the next armistice. Well, Uncle Sam has found a spot like that for about 200,000 men - a spot where wartime jobs will not only outlast the war, but will probably last 10 to 20 years after the world settles down to peace. The job is in one of the many shipyards which dot the coasts of the United States and in the dozens more which are being built or reopened. Shipbuilding experts insist that a competent man can go into a shipyard today in his twenties and be fairly certain of still drawing his pay in his forties because of the tremendous tonnage of shipping which has been transferred and sunk. It takes only a few minutes to sink a ship by mine, shell, bomb, or torpedo, but it takes one to four years to build one. The average man hesitates to try to land a job in the field because he knows nothing about shipbuilding. Comparatively few of the present generation have had shipyard experience; the Social Security Board combed its files for shipyard workers at the beginning of the defense emergency and could find only 2,400 such men needing employment. There are two simple ways to get into this rather lush field. One is to get training from any good school which will fit men as expert boilermakers, carpenters, copper-smiths, cranemen, electricians, joiners, machinists, painters, patternmakers, pipe fitters, riveters, sheet metal workers or welders. A report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor indicates that shipyards will be grabbing such trained specialists right up until November, 1942, which gives any young man plenty of time to get the necessary knowledge so that he can go to work in a shipyard and add the specialized experience his job will require. Uncle Sam himself has figured out the other way to train shipyard workers. While the number thus far turned out is only a drop in a bucket compared with the 10 to 15 thousand new shipyard men needed every month, the plan has proved so successful it is going to be expanded from New York City, where it was tried experimentally, to cities along the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific Coast. An executive in the National Youth Administration conceived the double-barreled idea - first, of grabbing off an old shipyard on Staten Island, employing veteran shipyard mechanics as foremen and giving thousands of young men the chance to learn shipbuilding by work on ship repair. The second angle was to let the novices get their skill by repairing vessels of the navy, coast guard, maritime commission and the City of New York. This would relieve other shipyards trying to digest Uncle Sam’s order for 312 emergency cargo ships and hundreds of other craft. As a result, the man who conceived the idea, Harold C. Baker, is operating the most unusual shipyard in the world. While other shipyards are clamoring for men, this one is glad to have a labor turnover and is anxious to get rid of its best workers as soon as possible. At first, the officials in charge of government vessels needing repairs were hesitant to trust their craft to the yard, but after a few cutters and patrol boats had been over-hauled and sent off shipshape by the eager young men and their competent veteran foremen, the skippers of damaged ships began making applications in such number that a long waiting list now exists. More than 1,000 trainees between the ages of 17 and 24, are now on the job, working under 90 instructors with an average experience of 30 years. Vessels ranging from launches to 250-foot craft, including cutters, patrol boats, scows and tugs are moving in and out of the drydocks at arate of 16 to 18 a month. A waiting list exists for trainees, too, because it has gotten around that a physically able and fairly intelligent young man, regardless of his education, can draw $25 a month and his lunch, plus medical services, while he works six hours a day, five days a week for three months. If he is exceptionally intelligent and willing, or has had some specialized experience, he is likely to be put to work at good pay in a shipyard before his training period elapses. He also receives related classroom training. A man who has had no special practice at any of the occupations valuable in a shipyard is likely to find himself spending the first few days chipping rust and barnacles off a steel hull with hammer and chisel. As soon as the novice gets familiar with the shipyard, he usually expresses a desire to become a specialist, such as a welder, or a blacksmith, or a joiner. If he seems apt at the occupation he suggests, he is placed in a position where he can learn by doing. If he decides to be a chipper or scaler, he is likely to find himself, first with hammer and chisel, knocking off an eighth-inch covering of barnacles and rust from the bottom of a City of New York garbage scow, a tedious job which must be done carefully. As he progresses, he may find himself using a pneumatic hammer and chisel on a steel deck. Here he must be even more careful, or his instrument will knock a hole in the deck. He'll learn to clean the deck or hull with a wire brush. If he is a painter, he will follow a chipper over a cleaned area of steel hull and coat the exposed metal with red lead, anticorrosion paint and finally an antifouling mixture which discourages barnacles and other underwater growths. Perhaps the newcomer will get a chance to learn drydock operation. The intricate valves which flood huge tanks with water to lower a drydock, and the valves which pump air into the tanks to raise a vessel will have to be measured and he will learn how to set the drydock blocks which will support the craft without damaging its hull after it has been raised from the water. He will also find out how to rig the ropes to hold a boat where the blocks will catch the hull as the drydock rises. If he gets a chance to become a shipwright, he may find himself tapping the hull of a wooden coast-guard patrol boat with a hammer until a dull thud instead of a hard ringing sound tells him he has found a weak section. If his foreman verifies his find, he and his crew will chisel away the damaged plank about four feet on both sides of the weak spot and then prepare a fresh plank in the precise dimensions necessary. He will fasten the new plank in place with screws and calk the seams so the patched area will be as sound as the rest of the hull. In the blacksmith shop he might learn to forge nuts and bolts of special sizes and dimensions; in the carpenter shops he might do many of the hundreds of carpentry jobs that turn up on a vessel which battles the seas. In the machine shops he might be taught not only to use tools, but to repair them. While the Staten Island shipyard, at which the training program was launched on an experimental basis, is being closed, work is being continued at other yards.