Henry Ford and the $5 Day: Giovanni Tedesco

Giovanni Tedesco

“We are still going to need a union, Geraldine, and let me tell you why. Yes, yes, yes the $5 day is in place but that’s just wages. There’s more to a union than wages. Everyone is focusing on wages and forgetting that the union is more than better wages. We are all missing the point here. Now, I am happy that everyone is getting a pay raise. Yes, that’s right. I am happy. But there are a couple of matters to be considered. No, I am not saying that we should turn the $5 Day aside. But what I am saying is that we have to keep the whole picture in focus. There is a lot more at stake here than just $5 every day.

It’s the very basis of what we believed as Marxist-Socialists. The $5 Day is simply a momentary victory. It is fleeting at best and while it may look good now but it is distracting us — you and me, the workers — from continuing to focus on the three pillars of the future. Yes, I will admit, that the first two are minor compared to the third but all three are a concern to all of us today, tomorrow and decades from now. First there is the question of workplace safety. Then there is the question of replacement workers and finally, the big question, profits.

As to the first, getting $5 a day is very good news as long as you are getting the $5 a day. But you are not going to be getting that $5 a day if you are injured. You have to be able to work to get that $5 a day. What everyone is doing right now is focusing on the $5 a day. But there is more at stake here. You have to be working to get that $5 a day. That’s why we still need a union. Money is only part of the struggle against management. We need to have workplace safety, a way to make sure that we do not get injured on the job. And just as important, there has to be some contingency to make sure that if we are injured on the job we are not fired. Right now, if we lose our job we lose our housing. A lot is riding on our job and focusing on the $5 every day is causing us to lose sight of other important issues. We need make sure we are safe at work so our job is secure. That’s what a union would do, deal with the safety issue. The union would show management that safety is not an expense to the company; it is a benefit to the company. The fewer workers who are injured the less downtown there is on the assembly line. This is not a union thing like wages and benefits. It’s a way to keep the assembly line moving with quality men working at peak production speed.

Second, there is the question of replacement. At $5 a day there are going to be a line of men standing at the plant door waiting for an opening. What this means is that every one of us will be at the mercy of the line boss. Before the $5 day the line boss had to be reasonable because he did not want us to quit and go someplace else. No he does not have to be nice. He can toss us out at a moment’s notice because he knows he can replace us at a moment’s notice.

Here’s another way to look at it. Suppose you have 3,000 workers and 10% of them are lazy. That’s 300 lazy workers. So you fire the 300 lazy workers and hire 300 new ones. Simply on the basis of statistics you are going to get 270 good workers and another 30 who are lazy — that’s 10%. Now you have 30 lazy workers instead of 300. Then you fire the 30 lazy ones and get 30 new workers of whom 10%, or 3, are lazy. What you are effectively done is eliminated all but three lazy workers. Out of 3,000. That’s how management thinks. If they fire enough workers with bad habits they will end up with 100% of their workers with good habits.

There are two problems with this, both of which are solved with a union. First, those men standing in line at the gate are not all good workers. If they were good workers they would be working. Both you and I know that almost all the good jobs go to men with connections. If you know someone on the inside you can get a good job. Companies prefer to hire people with connections rather than someone off the street. If Charles is a good worker and he recommends George than the line boss is likely to hire George rather than someone he knows nothing about who is standing in line at the employment window.

So that line of unemployed is composed of men who are not top quality. They are going from factory to factory looking for a job. If they were good they’d have a job. So if management fires someone in the Ford plant for being lazy or unqualified, the chances the plant with hire another lazy or unqualified person is very good. The plant is not solving the problem of poor workers by expecting replacement workers to be better. That’s another reason you need a union. The shop steward has to convince the line boss that over the long run the company is better off convincing the lazy workers to improve their attitude and training the unqualified worker to be qualified. At the end of the day you will have a quality employee instead of a history of hiring and firing lazy, unqualified workers time after time after time.

The second problem with replacement is that the automobile industry is changing very fast. We are not making the same kind of a car today that we were making yesterday and the Ford automobile of 196, 1917 and 1918 are going to be substantially different than those of 1913 and 1914. On top of that there is a war in Europe and we are making all kinds of military vehicles. We are in a very sophisticated field and it is going to get even more so. But the problem is that the line boss is looking at the workers while the workers are looking at the cars. That is, the line bosses want the assembly line to keep moving. They are not particularly concerned what kind of automobile is being made and they do not care. Their job is to keep the line in motion. The workers, on the other hand, are very concerned about the kind of car being made. They have to be. First, they have to be skilled in the making of that car. That keeps them employed. Then they have to anticipate the skill they will need for the next year’s model but that will ensure they stay employed. And if they are smart — and we have a lot of smart workers — they are looking down the road to see what kind of cars are being contemplated over the next five, six or seven years. If you want to move up you need new skills for new cars. If a worker wants to make more money he has to be qualified to work on the new cars before they start down the assembly line.

Once again, here a union will benefit all of us even with the $5 day. The stewards have to work with the line bosses to show them that replacing a worker they don’t like just because they do not like him is a bad idea. First, a new worker has to be trained. Second, if the fired worker was qualified he is going to be able to find a new job — possibly a better one — at one of the other automobile factories. Every Studebaker that is bought is one less Ford being bought and at $5 a day no one from the Ford assembly line is going to be going to the Studebaker factory. But Ford will only stay in business if people are buying Ford cars and those cars have to be better, sleeker and sophisticated. The term that is now coming into full use is ‘all the bells and whistles.’ If you go to a low rent movie house you get the silent picture with no sound. But uptown you get a piano with sound effects like bells and whistles. Bells and whistles are the state of the art.

Right now Ford motor cars are state of the art. You cannot get a better car than a Ford. But that is today. No one knows what is going to happen tomorrow. But the one thing you can be sure of is that today’s cars are not going to sell tomorrow. If people are going to pay hard cash for an automobile they want the best one that money can buy. The get the best one that money can buy off the assembly line means you have to have the best workers on the assembly line building the best car the designers could develop last year. The problem is that the line bosses don’t care about any of this. Their job is to keep the assembly line running. They can fire anyone and they do fire anyone. So you’ve got have a union to keep the line bosses from running the floor like it was their own empire. We want to make sure that men get fired for cause, not because someone just doesn’t like them because they are German, Negro or tell bad jokes.

But the most important reason — and it is a critical reason — to push forward on forming the union is because the basic Marxian concept has yet to be actualized. See, the real question yet to be answered by industrialization and capitalism is quite simple: who deserves profit? The company says all profits from cars belong to the company because the workers have already been paid. The workers have been paid so that’s all they deserve. But that is not accurate. You see, a car has many parts made from many natural resources: steel, glass, wire and rubber. But you cannot throw the parts of car on the ground and expect it to magically assemble itself. It takes human sweat, brains, muscle and precision handiwork to make a car. That only comes from human beings. Humans are the critical ingredient. With no humans there would be no cars; no cars made and no cars bought.

No, Geraldine, not yet. Don’t argue with me yet. We need to get the entire union argument out on the table, as it were. The main point all of us are discussing here — and it is a discussion not an argument — is whether we need a union at all if we have a $5 Day. What many of you have been saying is that since we are getting $5 every day we don’t need a union because we are getting more than the wage increase we wanted. In fact, we are getting twice the going rate which is much better than what we would have gotten with a union. That is true. But what is also true is that many of us are being blinded by money. Wages come and go but working conditions are forever. So are profits. So just let me finish and they can all decide what you want.

If the workers have no stake in profits, there is reason for them to do anything better than average. If you are getting $5 a day for doing a bad job and nothing more for doing a good job, why strive to do better? So you don’t. Worse, you are banking on being employed at $5 a day forever. But no one can predict what the economy will do. Times are good now but they will not always be good. When times get bad, Ford is going to ask the workers to take a pay cut. That’s how companies weather bad times. They cut expenses. But automobile manufacturers cannot cut the price of steel or glass or wire or rubber. But they can cut the wages of the workers. So they do. And will. Yes, we are making $5 a day now but there will come a time when Ford will have to cut wages. That’s simply an economic reality. It doesn’t make any difference if you are a Marxist-Socialist or a capitalist. It’s economics and just as time as time can be good they can be bad too. When times get bad — and they will — the workers will be asked to take a wage cut for the good the company.

It is odd that right now the $5 day is actually very Marxian — though Henry Ford is not going to admit it. Look at it realistically, the market rate is about $2.43 a day and we will be getting $5 a day. That means we are getting $2.57 a day out of the profit of the Ford Motor Company. Marx has triumphed! The workers are getting a share of the profits! The actual share of that profit shows up on our paychecks. We can actually see the dollars and cents of profit we are receiving. See, on my paycheck I got $60.69 for a month’s work and $69.12 in Profits Withheld. Right here in black-and-white, I got $69.12 from Ford Motor Company profits. It is a Marxian triumph in black ink!

We have come to the point in history where the tool maker, lathe operator and die sinker are getting a share of the capitalist profit! They may not be captains of industry but they are certainly the sergeants, corporals and privates of industry. A drill press operator now is as important as the line boss and salesman; no one makes a penny unless everyone does their job. And everyone shares in the profit of the collective work. Now, the shirkers will be shammed. The lazy worker who walks around and looks busy is costing everyone their share of the profit.

There is, I must admit, a fly in the ointment here and, at the end of the day, it may prove fatal. That flaw is that Henry Ford expects every worker who gets a share of the profit of the Ford Motor Company to account for his share in both monetary and moral terms. Being required to bank money or spend it wisely is not a bad thing but it is a matter of personal choice. Henry Ford wants to make that choice for us. That may be fine and dandy when the worker is making $5 a day but what will happen when the day rate goes to $10 a day or workers Albert wants to buy a Studebaker instead of a Ford?

Dangerously bad is the latter. To get the $5 a day we have to prove we are moral individuals. Money and morality are different. You can bank money and chart its rise in a savings account. But you cannot establish a universal value for morality. While it is easy to say that drunkards are not moral, why is it that women are making less than men when they are doing similar jobs? Women are just as agile as the men and are no less absent. Yes, a woman will get married and become pregnant. But men can simply get another job and leave. Both are called absenteeism but the woman is penalized because she is not considered a head of household. Then there are the 250 assembly line supervisors whose morals are not being scrutinized. Why not? Are they more moral than the workers? Not from what I have seen on the line.

Now, here is dilemma for you to ponder. As a worker, whether you have a union or not, you are paid per hour or per day. You are contracted to work an eight-hour day and you do. So when the company comes and asks you to take a wage cut to help the company, you are not going to be happy. After all, you upheld your part of the contract. You were employed to work eight hours a day and you did. Now the company wants you to take a wage cut because the company is not making money. But you had nothing to do with the company losing money. You did not design the car. You did not set the price for the car. You did not hire the salesmen who sold the car. You did what you were paid to do and now you are being asked to take a wage cut.

Why? So the company can make money.

Now, if you were getting the profit from the sale of cars, yes, you should take a wage cut. But you are not getting anything from the sale of the cars. So why should you take a wage cut? If Ford wants you to take a gamble with them, fine, but you should be getting a share of the profits. That’s as Marxian as I can state it.

So you see, even with the $5 Day you need a union. You need a union because too many people are focusing on the $5 a day and not on the other things that workers need. That $5 a day is not worth anything if you can be injured on the assembly line and then fired for not working. That $5 a day is not worth anything if you can be replaced at the whim of a line boss because he doesn’t like Germans or Negroes or he thinks you are too old or too cocky. And the $5 a day is fine and dandy now that Ford motorcars flying off the assembly line like bats out of Hell but believe me, over the long run, if the workers do not get a significant piece of the profit pie you, we are all going to regret not having a union.”

[This story is from Steven Levi’s collection of Henry Ford short stories FIND A REMEDY on Kindle.]