While $5 a day was a generous factory wage at the time, it came with a substantial catch. “That’s just not a feasible way to run a business,” she says. Before the $5 wage, the company had to hire 52,000 people a year just to maintain a workforce of 14,000. Esch, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas and author of The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire. “Ford’s only goal-and he says this…was to pay people enough money to make them not quit all the time,” says Elizabeth D.
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WATCH: Full episodes of the 'Titans That Built America' online now.Īt the time, the business titan’s top priority was to stabilize his work force. The move proved seismic: By prompting wage hikes across the car industry, historians say, it gave American factory workers a crucial boost into the middle class, allowing many to afford their own Model Ts. So on January 5, 1914, he announced that his company would double wages to $5 a day. To solve the problem, Ford realized it would be cheaper to raise wages (which at the time were competitive with those at other auto companies) than to continue hiring and training new people at the same pace.
The turnover rate at Ford’s Highland Park, Michigan factory soared to 370 percent. 1905.Ī decade after Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903, he rolled out one of the biggest innovations in industrial history: the first moving assembly line for car production.īut while it dramatically reduced manufacturing time-from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes per car, allowing mass production of up to 10,000 Model T cars a day by 1925-it also made his workers’ jobs more monotonous and unsatisfying.
American automobile engineer and manufacturer Henry Ford poses in the driver's seat of his latest model, outside the Ford factory in Detroit, Michigan, c.
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