My Life and Work
two men are being paid for what one can do, the people are paying double
what they ought. And it is a fact that only a little while ago in the
United States, man for man, we were not producing what we did for
several years previous to the war.
A day's work means more than merely being "on duty" at the shop for the
required number of hours. It means giving an equivalent in service for
the wage drawn. And when that equivalent is tampered with either
way--when the man gives more than he receives, or receives more than he
gives--it is not long before serious dislocation will be manifest.
Extend that condition throughout the country, and you have a complete
upset of business. All that industrial difficulty means is the
destruction of basic equivalents in the shop. Management must share the
blame with labour. Management has been lazy, too. Management has found
it easier to hire an additional five hundred men than to so improve its
methods that one hundred men of the old force could be released to other
work. The public was paying, and business was booming, and management
didn't care a pin. It was no different in the office from what it was in
the shop. The law of equivalents was broken just as much by managers as
by workmen. Practically nothing of importance is secured by mere demand.
That is why strikes always fail--even though they may seem to succeed. A
strike which brings higher wages or shorter hours and passes on the
burden to the community is really unsuccessful. It only makes the
industry less able to serve--and decreases the number of jobs that it
can support. This is not to say that no strike is justified--it may draw
attention to an evil. Men can strike with justice--that they will
thereby get justice is another question. The strike for proper
conditions and just rewards is justifiable. The pity is that men should
be compelled to use the strike to get what is theirs by right. No
American ought to be compelled to strike for his rights. He ought to
receive them naturally, easily, as a matter of course. These justifiable
strikes are usually the employer's fault. Some employers are not fit for
their jobs. The employment of men--the direction of their energies, the
arranging of their rewards in honest ratio to their production and to
the prosperity of the business--is no small job. An employer may be
unfit for his job, just as a man at the lathe may be unfit. Justifiable
strikes are a sign that the boss needs another job--one that he can
handle. The unfit employer causes more trouble than the unfit employee.
You can change the latter to another more suitable job. But the former
must usually be left to the law of compensation. The justified strike,
then, is one that need never have been called if the employer had done
his work.
There is a second kind of strike--the strike with a concealed design. In
this kind of strike the workingmen are made the tools of some
manipulator who seeks his own ends through them. To illustrate: Here is
a great industry whose success is due to having met a public need with
efficient and skillful production. It has a record for justice. Such an
industry presents a great temptation to speculators. If they can only
gain control of it they can reap rich benefit from all the honest effort
that has been put into it. They can destroy its beneficiary wage and
profit-sharing, squeeze every last dollar out of the public, the
product, and the workingman, and reduce it to the plight of other
business concerns which are run on low principles. The motive may be the
personal greed of the speculators or they may want to change the policy
of a business because its example is embarrassing to other employers who
do not want to do what is right. The industry cannot be touched from
within, because its men have no reason to strike. So another method is
adopted. The business may keep many outside shops busy supplying it with
material. If these outside shops can be tied up, then that great
industry may be crippled.
So strikes are fomented in the outside industries. Every attempt is made
to curtail the factory's source of supplies. If the workingmen in the
outside shops knew what the game was, they would refuse to play it, but
they don't know; they serve as the tools of designing capitalists
without knowing it. There is one point, however, that ought to rouse the
suspicions of workingmen engaged in this kind of strike. If the strike
cannot get itself settled, no matter what either side offers to do, it
is almost positive proof that there is a third party interested in
having the strike continue. That hidden influence does not want a
settlement on any terms. If such a strike is won by the strikers, is the
lot of the workingman improved? After throwing the industry into the
hands of outside speculators, are the workmen given any better treatment
or wages?
There is a third kind of strike--the strike that is provoked by the
money interests for the purpose of giving labour a bad name. The
American workman has always had a reputation for sound judgment. He has
not allowed himself to be led away by every shouter who promised to
create the millennium out of thin air. He has had a mind of his own and
has used it. He has always recognized the fundamental truth that the
absence of reason was never made good by the presence of violence. In
his way the American workingman has won a certain prestige with his own
people and throughout the world. Public opinion has been inclined to
regard with respect his opinions and desires. But there seems to be a
determined effort to fasten the Bolshevik stain on American Labour by
inciting it to such impossible attitudes and such wholly unheard-of
actions as shall change public sentiment from respect to criticism.
Merely avoiding strikes, however, does not promote industry. We may say
to the workingman:
"You have a grievance, but the strike is no remedy--it only makes the
situation worse whether you win or lose."
Then the workingman may admit this to be true and refrain from striking.
Does that settle anything?
No! If the worker abandons strikes as an unworthy means of bringing
about desirable conditions, it simply means that employers must get busy
on their own initiative and correct defective conditions.
The experience of the Ford industries with the workingman has been
entirely satisfactory, both in the United States and abroad. We have no
antagonism to unions, but we participate in no arrangements with either
employee or employer organizations. The wages paid are always higher
than any reasonable union could think of demanding and the hours of work
are always shorter. There is nothing that a union membership could do
for our people. Some of them may belong to unions, probably the majority
do not. We do not know and make no attempt to find out, for it is a
matter of not the slightest concern to us. We respect the unions,
sympathize with their good aims and denounce their bad ones. In turn I
think that they give us respect, for there has never been any
authoritative attempt to come between the men and the management in our
plants. Of course radical agitators have tried to stir up trouble now
and again, but the men have mostly regarded them simply as human
oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort of interest
that they would have in a four-legged man.
In England we did meet the trades union question squarely in our
Manchester plant. The workmen of Manchester are mostly unionized, and
the usual English union restrictions upon output prevail. We took over a
body plant in which were a number of union carpenters. At once the union
officers asked to see our executives and arrange terms. We deal only
with our own employees and never with outside representatives, so our
people refused to see the union officials. Thereupon they called the
carpenters out on strike. The carpenters would not strike and were
expelled from the union. Then the expelled men brought suit against the
union for their share of the benefit fund. I do not know how the
litigation turned out, but that was the end of interference by trades
union officers with our operations in England.
We make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. It is
absolutely a give-and-take relation. During the period in which we
largely increased wages we did have a considerable supervisory force.
The home life of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find
out what they did with their wages. Perhaps at the time it was
necessary; it gave us valuable information. But it would not do at all
as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned.
We do not believe in the "glad hand," or the professionalized "personal
touch," or "human element." It is too late in the day for that sort of
thing. Men want something more than a worthy sentiment. Social
conditions are not made out of words. They are the net result of the
daily relations between man and man. The best social spirit is evidenced
by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all.
That is the only way to prove good intentions and win respect.
Propaganda, bulletins, lectures--they are nothing. It is the right act
sincerely done that counts.
A great business is really too big to be human. It grows so large as to
supplant the personality of the man. In a big business the employer,
like the employee, is lost in the mass. Together they have created a
great productive organization which sends out articles that the world
buys and pays for in return money that provides a livelihood for
everyone in the business. The business itself becomes the big thing.
There is something sacred about a big business which provides a living
for hundreds and thousands of families. When one looks about at the
babies coming into the world, at the boys and girls going to school, at
the young workingmen who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying
and setting up for themselves, at the thousands of homes that are being
paid for on installments out of the earnings of men--when one looks at a
great productive organization that is enabling all these things to be
done, then the continuance of that business becomes a holy trust. It
becomes greater and more important than the individuals.
The employer is but a man like his employees and is subject to all the
limitations of humanity. He is justified in holding his job only as he
can fill it. If he can steer the business straight, if his men can trust
him to run his end of the work properly and without endangering their
security, then he is filling his place. Otherwise he is no more fit for
his position than would be an infant. The employer, like everyone else,
is to be judged solely by his ability. He may be but a name to the
men--a name on a signboard. But there is the business--it is more than a
name. It produces the living--and a living is a pretty tangible thing.
The business is a reality. It does things. It is a going concern. The
evidence of its fitness is that the pay envelopes keep coming.
You can hardly have too much harmony in business. But you can go too far
in picking men because they harmonize. You can have so much harmony that
there will not be enough of the thrust and counterthrust which is
life--enough of the competition which means effort and progress. It is
one thing for an organization to be working harmoniously toward one
object, but it is another thing for an organization to work harmoniously
with each individual unit of itself. Some organizations use up so much
energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they have no force
left to work for the object for which the organization was created. The
organization is secondary to the object. The only harmonious
organization that is worth anything is an organization in which all the