With the Model T, Ford moved from having a team of workers assemble an entire automobile to breaking down the assembly process into many discrete steps. At stationary stands, arrayed in a large circle, cars were put together piece by piece, with parts carried to the stands as they were needed. But rather than working on one car until it was completed, workers walked around the circle, at each stand doing just one particular operation—attaching the frame to the axles or fitting in the engine or installing the steering wheel. After the last operation (fitting in the floorboards), the completed car was removed for testing and shipment and the first parts for a new vehicle were laid out at the station. In mid-1913, the Model T assembly area had a hundred stations, with five hundred assemblers cycling around them and another hundred workers bringing them parts.15
Figure 4.1 The magneto assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park factory in Detroit in 1913.
From there it was just one small step, but a world-historic revolution, to keeping the workers stationary and moving the vehicles as they were being assembled. In August 1913, Ford engineers tried pulling chassis frames through a corridor of preplaced parts, with assemblers walking along with the vehicles installing them. Then they switched to positioning stationary workers along the path of the vehicles, having them attach parts to the chassis being slowly pulled past by a chain drive below. By April 1914, the assembly line had reduced the labor time needed for final assembly of a car from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three minutes.
The success of the final assembly line led to a burst of innovation, as Ford engineers introduced gravity slides, rollways, conveyor belts, chain-driven assembly lines, and other material-handling systems to various subassembly operations, everything from putting together motors to upholstering seats. Many of the subassembly lines fed directly into the final line, delivering engines, wheels, radiators, other components, and, ultimately, finished bodies to the appropriate spots for their installation on the moving chassis. Just as at the Derby silk mill and the Waltham cotton mill, a new system of production came together in a remarkably short period of time. In less than two years after the first experiments with the assembly line, Ford had installed the system for all phases of Model T production. The factory had become one huge, integrated machine.16
Ford Labor Problems and the Five Dollar Day
Some of the productivity gain of the assembly line came from the greater efficiency of material handling. Some came from the increased division of labor. But much of it came from the sheer intensification of work, the elimination of the ability of workers to wander around looking for a part or tool, to slow down while a foreman wasn’t watching, or to store up finished parts to allow resting later on. For assembly-line workers, work was relentless and repetitious, a single task or just a few done over and over again, every time a new part or subassembly or chassis appeared before them.17
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, management experts considered “soldiering” (workers deliberately working at less than a maximum possible pace) the paramount obstacle to efficiency and profits. To counter it, they devised all sorts of schemes, from elaborate systems of piecework pay to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management.” The assembly line provided an alternate solution to the same problem, having machinery set the pace of work rather than foremen or incentives. Well before Ford adopted the assembly line, packing house managers saw the possibilities in mechanically pacing production; in 1903, a Swift supervisor said, “if you need to turn out a little more, speed up the conveyers a little and the men speed up to keep pace.”18
Assembly-line work proved physiologically and psychologically draining in ways other types of labor were not. More than ever before, workers were extensions of machinery, at the mercy of its demands and its pace. One worker complained, “The weight of a tack in the hands of an upholsterer is insignificant, but if you have to drive eight tacks in every Ford cushion that goes by your station within a certain time, and know that if you fail to do it you are going to tie up the entire platform, and you continue to do this for four years, you are going to break under the strain.” Another said, “If I keep putting on Nut No. 86 for about 86 more days, I will be Nut No. 86 in the Pontiac bughouse.” Ford workers complained that assembly-line work left them in a nervous condition they dubbed “Forditis.” Speed, dexterity, and endurance, not knowledge and skill, were the attributes needed for assembly-line work. Men aged quickly on the line, no longer considered desirable workers well before middle age.19
The swelling sales of Model Ts left the Ford Motor Company with a voracious appetite for labor, especially “operators,” unskilled workers who by 1913 constituted a majority of the workforce. From about 450 employees in 1908, the company leaped to roughly 14,000 in 1913. The Highland Park factory, where Model Ts were made, averaged 12,888 workers in 1914, a size that surpassed even the largest nineteenth-century plants.
Highland Park was not unique. Big and very big factories were becoming more common in the United States. In 1914 there were 648 manufacturing establishments with over one thousand workers. By 1919, there were 1,021 (54 of which made automobiles or automobile parts or bodies), which together employed 26.4 percent of the manufacturing workforce. Rising demand led firms to expand existing facilities, as many companies preferred to keep manufacturing centralized near their administrative headquarters, expediting supervision and coordination. General Electric had 15,000 workers at its Schenectady, New York, complex and 11,000 at a plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. Pullman and International Harvester each employed 15,000 workers at their Chicago plants. Goodyear Tire and Rubber had 15,500 employees in Akron, Ohio.
With its best-selling car and assembly-line operations, Ford soon leaped to a whole new scale. In 1916, Highland Park averaged 32,702 workers; in 1924, 42,000.20 Photographs of the inside of the plant show workers standing literally elbow to elbow, a density of human labor unlike anything seen in textile or steel mills or other types of manufacturing. They were crammed together not just because of their sheer numbers but by design. Ford engineers wanted workers and machines placed as close to one another as possible, to minimize the time and effort needed to transport parts and subassemblies.21
When Ford introduced the assembly line, extraordinarily high turnover added to the company’s difficulty in meeting its ever-growing need for workers. Turnover was a general problem for American industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Skilled workers were loyal to their craft, not their employer, often changing jobs to learn new skills or try a different environment. Unskilled workers left their jobs to seek higher pay, to take a vacation (in an era before employers provided any), when they had a dispute with a foreman, or for myriad other reasons. Staying put had no particular benefit.22
Ford methods pushed the turnover rate through the roof. Many workers hated Ford’s extremely routinized, repetitive work and the stressful pace of production, quitting often after only short tenures. Most simply walked away, never formally resigning. In 1913, the year the assembly line was introduced, Ford had an astounding turnover rate of 370 percent. To maintain a workforce of a bit less than 14,000, that year the company had to hire more than 52,000 workers. Absenteeism added to the difficulties; on any given day, 10 percent of Ford workers did not show up.
Ford had other labor problems, too. Increasingly, the labor pool in Detroit was made up of immigrant workers, especially in the unskilled ranks. In 1914, foreign-born workers made up 71 percent of the Ford workforce, from twenty-two different national groups. A babel of languages meant that workers often could not communicate with foremen or one another. One supervisor recalled that “every foreman had to learn in English, German, Polish and Italian” to say “hurry up.” Ethnic tensions sometimes exploded into fistfights. In January 1914, the company fired over eight hundred Greek and Russian workers for staying home to celebrate what by their Orthodox Christian calendar was Christmas but for the company was just another production day.
Detroit a
utomakers, including Ford, also worried about unions. The introduction of the assembly line coincided with a national surge of labor militancy. In Detroit, both the radical Industrial Workers of the World and the new Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers’ Union, affiliated with the more moderate American Federation of Labor, launched organizing drives in the auto industry, leading a few short strikes. Their gains were modest, but their specter haunted employers.23
Ford responded to its labor problems with a program of higher pay and shorter hours, “The Five Dollar Day.” Already, the company had begun instituting policies to retain employees and increase their productivity. In 1913, it introduced a multitiered wage plan that boosted pay as workers’ skills grew and, with longevity, a spur to self-improvement and steady employment. In early January 1914, the company went farther, shortening the workday from nine hours to eight (six days a week), which reduced the strain on workers while allowing Highland Park to go from two shifts to three. And more dramatically, it announced that it would effectively double the wages of unskilled workers, from somewhat below $2.50 to $5.00 a day. The wage boost set a precedent for mass production, especially automobile manufacturing, to be a high-wage system. Supporters hailed high wages for allowing workers to buy the kinds of goods they made, creating the mass purchasing power necessary to keep mass production going.
But the Five Dollar Day was more ambitious and more complicated than just a wage boost. Technically, it was not a pay increase at all but a possibility for workers to get what was dubbed a profit-sharing payment that would bring their daily income up to five dollars. Qualification was not automatic; women were not eligible (at least initially), male workers generally had to be over twenty-one, and, most importantly, they had to abide by a set of standards and regulations the company set, aimed not only at behavior in the factory but away from it, too. Workers had to be legally married to their partners, “properly” support their families, maintain good “home conditions,” demonstrate thrift and sobriety, and be efficient at their jobs. Ford established a “Sociological Department” to investigate if workers were eligible for the profit sharing and to guide them in behavioral change if they were not.
Fifty investigators, often accompanied by translators, made home visits to Ford workers to assess their qualifications for the plan. After an initial round of investigations, 40 percent of the workers eligible by age and sex were deemed deficient in some respect to receive the payments. Failure to rectify their behavior within a given period led to dismissal, but improvements could win retroactive profit-sharing.
Ford was particularly concerned with “Americanizing” immigrant workers. Sociological Department agents encouraged them to adopt American habits and teach their children American ways. Workers who did not speak English were heavily pressured to attend an English school the company established, which taught “industry and efficiency” and American customs and culture along with language. Some 16,000 workers graduated in 1915 and 1916 alone, reducing the non-English-speaking component of the workforce from 35 percent in 1914 to 12 percent in 1917.24
There were precedents for many aspects of the Ford labor policies. The Lowell-style mills had their own elaborate regulations for behavior on and off the job. Like Ford, the mill owners had the challenge of establishing behavioral norms and worker self-discipline necessary for the collective, integrated nature of factory work. And like Ford, they had moral concerns that extended beyond the factory walls. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a new wave of behavior-shaping programs began as many companies, especially manufacturers with large plants, initiated “welfare work” to increase worker productivity and reduce turnover. Companies built cafeterias, libraries, and “rest rooms”; offered recreational activities, health services, and pensions; established savings and insurance plans; and occasionally introduced the type of social work Ford imposed.
But the comprehensiveness of the Ford program, its intrusiveness, and its link to a doubling of wages put it at the forefront of employer efforts to shape the behavior and mindset of employees to make them fit into a factory regimen. S. S. Marquis, who became head of the Sociological Department in late 1915 (renaming it the Educational Department in response to widespread worker criticism of the home investigations), wrote: “as we adapt the machinery in the shop to turning out the kind of automobile we have in mind, so we have constructed our educational system with a view to producing the human product in mind.”25
Ford executives would have agreed with Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci when he wrote, “In America rationalization has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to a new type of work and production process.” Henry Ford’s rural Protestant moralism, with its stress on thrift, sexual rectitude, and spurning of alcohol and tobacco, prescribed a way of life that Ford executives—and Gramsci—saw as necessary for the physical and psychological demands of mass production. As the Italian communist, sounding like an auto executive, noted, “The employee who goes to work after a night of ‘excess’ is no good for his work.” “The enquiries conducted by the industrialists into the workers’ private lives,” Gramsci cautioned, “and the inspection services created by some firms to control the ‘morality’ of their workers are necessities of the new methods of work. People who laugh at these initiatives . . . and see in them only a hypocritical manifestation of ‘puritanism’ thereby deny themselves any possibility of understanding the importance, significance and objective import of the American phenomenon, which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create . . . a new type of worker and a new type of man.”26
Ironically, by the time Gramsci wrote his essay “Americanism and Fordism” (in prison after his 1926 arrest by the fascist Italian government), Henry Ford already had abandoned his effort to create “a new type of man.” As part of a cost-cutting drive during the 1920–21 recession, Ford shrank the responsibilities of the original Sociological Department until it effectively disappeared. He also abandoned his profit-sharing scheme, switching to a basic wage rate of six dollars a day (an income boost less than inflation), with bonuses based on skill and longevity. Deeming paternalism and welfare work too expensive and a threat to the control of the factory by production officials, Ford instead turned to an elaborate spy system and autocratic management to control labor. The “Service Department,” into which he folded the remnants of the Sociological Department, was headed by a Harry Bennett, a former boxer with extensive ties to the police and organized crime, who used spies and brute force to maintain discipline, hiring many ex-convicts to do the job.27 But if Ford himself abandoned the link between mass production and the creation of a “new man,” the idea itself would live on for decades, including in some very different places.
Alfred Kahn and the Modern Factory
To make the Model T, Ford created not only a new production system but also new types of factory structures, which became templates for generations of giant factories around the world. Their technical and visual legacy remains strong today.
Ford’s first factory, on Mack Avenue in Detroit, had been a small, one-story, wood-framed building. His second, completed in 1904 on Piquette Avenue, was considerably larger, a handsome, three-story brick building. But in design it differed little from an early nineteenth-century textile factory: long and narrow, with large windows and wooden columns, beams, and floors.28
Even before Model T production began, Ford anticipated that his company would soon outgrow Piquette Avenue, purchasing land in nearby Highland Park for a new plant. To design the factory he hired Detroit architect Alfred Kahn, who would become the foremost factory designer of the twentieth century. Kahn stumbled into industrial architecture early in his career, somewhat by chance. Eclectic in his commissions and styles, Kahn, a German Jewish immigrant, met Henry B. Joy, the head of the pioneer automaker Packard Motor Company, who helped him get a number of nonindustrial commissions before asking him to design a new factory complex for his firm.29
The first nine
buildings Kahn designed for Packard were conventional. But the tenth was a radical departure, made not of wood and brick but of reinforced concrete. In designing it, Kahn worked closely with his brother Julius, who had developed a system for reinforcing concrete with a particular type of metal bar.
Reinforced concrete, first used in Europe during the 1870s and in the United States not long after, was strong, resistant to vibration, inexpensive, and fireproof. It allowed for large, uninterrupted spaces and a greater window area than older construction methods. A concrete shoe factory, built in Massachusetts in 1903–04, brought the material to the attention of industrial architects. Kahn’s 1905 reinforced concrete Packard Plant Number 10, with its large window area and orderly layout, attracted much attention, as did a plant he built the following year in Buffalo for the George N. Pierce Company, which incorporated overhead cranes and rail platforms for loading, unloading, and moving materials.30 So when Ford hired him, Kahn already had begun building a reputation as an innovative factory designer.
The Highland Park complex extended Kahn’s earlier work. The exterior walls of the main four-story factory building were mostly glass, allowing in so much light that observers dubbed it the “Crystal Palace,” a reference to the London exhibition hall built over a half century earlier. Kahn convinced Ford to allow him to use metal window sashes, at the time so unusual that they had to be ordered from England, which gave the building a particularly clean, modern look. Inside, the large open spaces facilitated the experiments that led to the assembly line.
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