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Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

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Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#51

Post by jasongullickson »

kiba wrote: post #18
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He ran a "company town" - had stores, sold them lumber to build houses etc. Most of the money came right back to him.

For some reason(Correct me if I am wrong), the company town business model seem to have completely disappear. This, to me, suggest the uncompetitiveness of company towns.

You could argue that the ~10 miles surrounding any Wal-Mart Super Center are company town-ish (company suburb?); I bet most of the money paid out comes back in from employees returning to buy staples (figuratively).

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#53

Post by sprout »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #37
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He ran a "company town" - had stores, sold them lumber to build houses etc. Most of the money came right back to him.

It only came back to him if the company stores wildly overcharged his employees. If an employee spent $100 in a store with a 10% markup, Ford still lost a net of $90. Do the math - paying your workers "enough to buy your product" is an utterly flawed business model. It might work incidentally (i.e., high wages might attract high productivity employees), but it doesn't work as stated.

It's effectively pure fascism. It works fine so long as you treat your workers decently and they don't revolt.

I mean, say what you like about fascists, but their factories always run at high capacity.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#54

Post by philwelch »

openfly wrote: post #6

Uhm, Henry Ford was known for violently suppressing unions in his factories. He considered unions to be closely tied to "Jewish Zionist" ambitions. He was also a heavy monetary supporter of Adolf Hitler. In fact, he refused to give back awards he received from the Third Reicht, and was in fact buried with them. Oh, and he was illiterate. So word of advice... don't take advice from Henry Ford.

Genghis Khan wiped out more ethnic groups than Hitler even had a passing opinion about, but his tactics are still taught at military academies and war colleges and his basic doctrine--maneuver warfare--has for centuries been the most effective.

Moral judgment and proficiency are two different things. Ford was a brilliant industrialist who happened to be an anti-Semite. It doesn't mean we can't learn from his example, though we might think twice before we build massive statues of him.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#55

Post by pradocchia »

jodrellblank wrote: post #52
qq66 wrote: post #13

Amazing article -- I did not know that modern American "consumer culture" was deliberately created by Henry Ford.

Also see: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=century+of+self+... (6 parts)

For primary sources, try Propaganda (1928) by Edward Bernays.

Bernays pioneered many modern advertising techniques. He created demand where none existed prior, typically though psychological means. Torches of Freedom is a famous example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

Supposedly, he also had a hand in convincing the public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health, on behalf of Alcoa, and in concert w/ the American Dental Association. Does anyone have a primary source for that one?

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#56

Post by hop »

_delirium wrote: post #25
hop wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read his autobiography "My Life, and My Work" http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7213 Its fascinating. I think highly dyslexic is a better description than illiterate for Henry Ford, he was a genius. Pioneered material science, machining and forming metal cost effectively, made the assembly line, 161 patents, created enormous opportunity for hard working and smart people, brought cars to the masses. His politi…

I don't think his right-wing extremism can be explained away as a reaction to FDR or the impending war, since it goes back quite a bit earlier. He published The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem in 1920! It was actually the inspiration for parts of Mein Kampf (1923), which speaks approvingly of Ford and lifts some sections more or less directly from him. And, he met with and corresponded with Nazi repre…

Yes, that's fucked up and sad. Maybe all his success went to his head. My point was that not everything he did good should be cast in the bad light, for instance, a person wanting to run a manufacturing business could gain a lot from taking his advise. I'm not an apologist, just think there is value in reading about extraordinary people.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#57

Post by petercooper »

This is all great thinking on Ford's part but one piece stands out for me:

We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.

I like Ford's approach but he would not be impressed with how restricting the ability to lay off low value workers has damaged our economy. People are even put off of hiring knowing that they might be paying higher unemployment insurance at the end of it, and Europe was dominated (and weighed down) by trade unions for a long time.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#58

Post by anamax »

jbooth wrote: post #21
jswinghammer wrote: post #2

This sort of thinking drove government policy at the start of the Great Depression. President Hoover tried to maintain high wage rates seeing them as the cause of prosperity and not the effect of greater productivity. Henry Ford was probably the most influential person in this camp but most of American business at the time was on board with it as well. Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" has probably the b…

"proto-New Deal policies?" As I understand it, Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining a balanced federal budget through budget cuts and tax increases. That's the opposite of countercyclical spending, which along with some welfare state components made up the new deal. Maybe he was on board with the welfare state and the idea of people having high wages (who isn't?), but the government doesn't cut the majority of pay…

> As I understand it, Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining a balanced federal budget through budget cuts and tax increases.

You got it backwards. In fact FDR campaigned against Hoover's deficit spending.

Once in office, FDR reversed course and doubled-down on Hoover's approach.

Hoover and FDR shared a belief that excess production was the problem - that's why both pushed govt programs to restrict it. That's what put the "Great" in "Great Depression". (Previous panics didn't last nearly as long.) FDR didn't back off until the approaching WWII made it obvious that an "Arsenal of Democracy" had to actually produce massive amounts of stuff.

FWIW, Congressional Repubs at the time voted overwhelmingly for Social Security.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#59

Post by anamax »

jbooth wrote: post #40
kiba wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in absence of better proof provided, I'll stick with the opinion of the majority of historians. What is your rationale for sticking with whatever the majority of historians said? The rest of your points haven't had anything to do with government finances or the attitudes of both presidents towards countercyclical spending vs balanced budgets. They seem like some blindly-applied-backwards-80-years modern republi…

Because, respectfully, the entire thought process displayed by your post seems to consist of "government = bad, therefore new deal = bad". It shows very little effort to understand what was actually happening, it boxes a huuuuuge range of possibilities into a simple black/white viewpoint, and it's a silly oversimplification that has high correlation with modern republicans. As far as what the majority of historians s…

> As far as what the majority of historians said, if it's them or you, and you're not saying something very very persuasive, I'll tend to believe them.

Why?

The last time I looked, nothing about history was subject to "nature". If all historians agreed that Hitler had 7 arms and flew, nothing bad would happen.

If, on the other hand, engineers decided to act as if steel was less dense than air at 1 bar, things would go wrong.

Re: Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

#60

Post by jbooth »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #46
jbooth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting stuff. It does seem to turn out that Hoover pushed less for balanced budgets than I thought, although there are lots of statements attributed to him around 1932 trying to balance the budget, the tax hikes, etc. But I thought the difference was more clear-cut than that as far as their actions. Still, I find it hard to justify the statement that "they had the same view in regards to counter-cyclical spendin…

According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#1932_campaign ), there are statements attributed to FDR accusing Hoover of reckless spending and criticizing him for spending too much and putting too many people on the dole. There are a lot of statements attributed to Bush about humble foreign policy, limited government and deregulation, and statements attributed to Obama about how forcing people…

All fair points
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