Henry Ford and the $5 Day: Billy Sanderson
Billy Sanderson
“Five Dollars a Day! Five Dollars a Day! That’s twice what I’m making now, Doris. FIVE damn dollars a day. What we can do with five dollars a day! Thank you very much Mr. Henry T. Ford! Five dollars a day starting in three weeks, on January 5, of 1914! Who would ever have thought I’d be making $5 a day! Double! Double what I making now. And when Billy Jr. finishes school we’ll be at $10 a day! We are not going to be living on no Easy Street but we’ll be able to save money. Billy, Jr.’s kids might get out of this working-class hellhole. We’re, you and I, are pretty much stuck in the working class but who knows what Billy Jr.’s kids will be can be.
There’s been a lot of talk around the plant about the $5 day. Hell, everyone’s talking! Almost every one of us is going to get the raise, higher for line bosses and administrators. That’s always the way it is. Higher up in the administration the more you make. It’s rigged system but that’s OK. Them that makes it into those clouds earned it — ‘cept if they got connections which we ain’ got.
But I’ll tell you what we are not going to do with that extra $2.50 a day. It’s not going to be frittered. We can eat better and dress better and maybe replace some of this broken furniture but we’ve got to put a lot of it into the bank. Ford Motor Company is setting up a savings and loan company where we can save money. We’ve only got a hundred or two in there now, enough to keep us alive for a month or two if things go bad but we need more than that. So a lot of that money’s gotta go into the bank. There are rainy day’s coming for sure.
I don’t know if I told you but one of the changes around the plant are going to be the sociologicals. I thought I told about them, maybe not. Anyway, to get the $5 a day you’ve got to live life Henry Ford’s way. Got to be a morals person, a person with morals. He don’t particularly care about what race you are — as long as you aren’t a Negro or a Jew — but you’ve got to be a moral person. You can drink but not too much, ‘course that’s not a problem in this house except when your mother comes to visit. Ha! Yeah! Ha!
Not everyone is gitting the $5 a day. Good workers with good morals, yeah, but not everyone. Sociologicals gotta look at you first. You get a good report you get the profit-sharing, the whole $5 a day. More if you are line boss and more that than if you’re a supervisor. This is moral money, not working money. Money to keep you on the straight and narrow, if you know what I mean. Clean life, clean house, clean family.
Now we’ve got to live a clean life here, Doris. We’re doing that now, not living like the Wops, to keep this $5 a day. Clean home, church on Sunday just like we have been doin’. Billy Jr.’s got to stay out of trouble, not that he’s ever been a bad kid, clean shirt at work, bathing, stuff like that. There are going to be sociologicals all over the place pretty soon, asking all kinds of questions to make sure we’re moral folk. No reason for us to get bad marks. But I want to make sure that we don’t get bad marks for telling on neighbors. Gotta let God punish the wicked for their own transgressions. That’s God’s job, not ours. What we need to do is keep our noses clean, not that we have to change that much ’cause we are honest folk. But I don’t want anyone saying we were talking out’s the side of our mouth about neighbors. I don’t need that kind of trouble on the line and we don’t need that kind of backstabbing at church or the social. An’ we’ve got to tell Billy Jr. that we’re at the dawn of whole new day and he is going to be the one what has the most to gain.”
[This story is from Steven Levi’s collection of Henry Ford short stories FIND A REMEDY on Kindle.]
