National Clothesline

hirts are a pain because it takes a while to train a presser. Pressing shirts is more of a specialty than other items. So much so that we sometimes over-pay a shirt presser just because we have found someone who is good and we want to keep him on the staff.

Worse still, we sometimes tolerate insubordination and other ghastly employee conduct just so that the shirt presser won’t quit.

If a presser does an inferior press job on a shirt, the touch-up necessary may take longer than it took

to press the shirt (correctly or incorrectly) in the first place. This is important and contributes heavily to making shirts a royal pain.

Conversely, when an inspector finds a pressing defect on, say, a pair of pants, the touch-up necessary to bring the garment from unacceptable to acceptable often takes mere seconds. A quick pass with the all-steam iron or dancing the pants — still on the hanger — over a puffer and you’re done.

Try that with shirts. It will yield poor results.

I remember the manager of a competitor telling me about 15 years ago that it took her one year of working with a new employee before she felt like that employee could hold her own on a shirt press. She was actually much more blunt: “I gotta carry ’em for a year before they’re any good to me.”

I’m not sure that I agree with that, but they did have old, clunky equipment that is very hard to train on. It isn’t so difficult with the newer equipment.

But when a drycleaner has three drycleaning pressers and one shirt presser, who is most expendable? Hard to say, I suppose, but I guess that you’d rather hold on to the shirt presser.

First day on the job

I have been to many plants where I am told that the person pressing pants (or some other garment type) is a brand new employee — first day or second day.

I can’t immediately tell. I admit that the smaller the plant, the more evident this would be, but the fact is that drycleaning pressers can often cover each other. The shirt presser’s on her own.

If several pressers in the drycleaning department are contributing to the total output of the department, a new presser — or a weak one — will not slow down the others. In some shirt departments, the total output is only as fast as the slowest presser. I don’t think that this is ever true in the drycleaning arena.

Also, if a new drycleaning presser needs to be trained, it usually does not require 100 percent of a trainer’s time. That is, a trainer will show a newbie how to press a pair of pants or a sweater in an hour or less. Then the trainer can return to their own station.

The trainee may not be perfect, but if he is merely slow, sheer repetition will make him faster. If the quality is sub-standard, it is unlikely that re-doing a drycleaning piece will take longer than pressing it in the first place. Also, the new employee doesn’t have a negative impact.

If a new employee is being trained by your best pants presser who usually presses 36 pants per hour, but can’t today because she is training the newcomer, you get a double-whammy: No 36 pants per hour plus entry-level productivity from the new presser. This probably doesn’t happen. What is more likely is an introductory training session, followed by intermittent follow-ups. Speed will come with practice.

Conversely, in the shirt department, it takes a concerted effort to train a presser. An introductory training session will not make the grade unless we plan to accept poor quality and/or painstakingly slow productivity. If new employees are allowed to “learn as they go,” the resulting quality will likely be very poor.

Worse still, is the all-important fact that touch-up time will exceed the original press time.

This is the most distressing fact about training a shirt presser. If you doubt this, look at it this way: If you are doing 90 shirts per hour, you are producing a shirt in 45 seconds.

If the press job is unacceptable, how often can you take that shirt and make it “perfect” or “acceptable” in 45 seconds or less in the touch-up area?

To make all this even more distasteful, picture a two-person unit with a new presser and an experienced one. Does the experienced presser make up for the deficiencies of the new employee? Or does the inexperienced presser slow down the new one? You already know the answer.

Who does the training?

I think that a key reason for all of these training issues is that in many plants, the managers can’t train because they aren’t capable of pressing.

Many times, I ask the manager to press. Usually I ask this so that I can evaluate the supervisor’s ability to train, figuring that the first step to assuring that the manager can train is assuring that he knows the job in the first place. Some of them are not only incapable of training or pressing but actually look down upon the chore and the people who are paid to do it.

This is bad for a cornucopia of reasons, not the least of which is the wedge that it cements between employee and employer. You surely lose control over the employee if you are incapable of doing his or her job.

When you see a substandard press job, you can not tell the difference between equipment errors and operator errors. You don’t know if this defect can be prevented by follow-up training or not. Frankly, you take the presser’s word for it.

That is like a bookkeeper auditing himself. With the manager’s inability to train, you breed laissez-faire quality and worse, declining quality standards. Raising the quality standards is completely out of the question.

How much does that suck?

A “good” presser?

So, in the final analysis, when we find an employee who doesn’t need much training, which is extremely important because we may not be able to train her anyway, we pay her too much. We do this to keep her around. By itself, that isn’t such a bad thing.

A presser who can’t press is worse than a singer who can’t sing or a dancer who can’t dance.

If you have a good, quality employee, you want to keep that person around. But is the presser “good” for the right reasons? Is the presser “good” because she doesn’t miss work? Is the presser “good” because she gets along with co-workers? Is the presser “good” because she is personable? Or is she “good” because she comes to work, gets along with others and does a good quality shirt quickly?

The personality traits were probably rooted before kindergarten. The pressing skills are for you to teach. Make sure that your laundry manager is the best trainer of the bunch. It is critical to making shirts much less of a pain.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.”

Donald Desrosiers has been in the shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@comcast.net and he has web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com