Henry Ford’s Own Story/Chapter 27
CHAPTER XXVII
THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB
That surging mob of men outside this factory during the week following the announcement of his profit-sharing plan had impressed indelibly on Ford's mind the tremendous importance of a job.
"A workingman's job is his life," he says. "No one man should have the right ever to send another man home to his family out of work. Think what it means to that man, sitting there at the supper table, looking at his wife and children, and not knowing whether or not he will be able to keep them fed and clothed.
"A normal, healthy man wants to work. He has to work to live right. Nobody should be able to take his work away from him. In my factory every man shall keep his job as long as he wants it."
Impractical? The idea seems fantastic in its impracticality. What, keep every man lazy, stupid, impudent, dishonest, as he may be every man in a force of 18,000 workmen, on the pay roll as long as he wants to stay? Surely, if there is any point at which ideals of human brotherhood end and coldblooded business methods begin, this should be that point.
But Ford, obstinate in his determination to care for the interests of every one, declared that this policy should stand. As a part of his new plan, he installed the labor clearing house as part of his employment department.
Now when a foreman discharges a man, that man is not sent out of the factory. He goes with a written slip from the foreman to the labor clearing house. There he is questioned. What is wrong? Is he ill? Does he dislike his work? What are his real interests?
In the end he is transferred to another department which seems more suited to his taste and abilities. If he proves unsatisfactory there, he returns again to the clearing house. Again his case is discussed, again he is given another chance in still another department. Meantime the employment managers take an active interest in him, in his health, his home conditions, his friends. He is made to feel that he has friends in the management who are eager to help him make the right start to the right kind of life.
Perhaps he is ill. Then he is sent to the company hospital, given medical care and a leave of absence until he is well enough to resume work.
Over 200 cases of tuberculosis in various stages were discovered among Ford's employees when his hospital was established. These men presented a peculiar problem. Most of them were still able to work, all of them must continue working to support families. Yet, if their cases were neglected it meant not only their own deaths, but spreading infection in the factory.
The business world has never attempted to solve the problem of these men. Waste from the great machine, they are thrown carelessly out, unable because of that tell-tale cough to get an other job, left to shift for themselves in a world which thinks it does not need them.
Ford established a "heat-treating department" especially for them. When the surgeons discover a case of incipient tuberculosis in the Ford factory, they transfer the man to this department, where the air, filtered, dried and heated, is scientifically better for their disease than the mountain climate of Denver. Here the men are given light jobs which they can handle, and paid their regular salaries until they are cured and able to return to their former places in the shops.
"It's better for everybody when a man stays at work, instead of laying off," Ford says. "I don't care what s wrong with him, whether he's a misfit in his department, or stupid, or sick. There's always some way to keep him doing useful work. And as long as he is doing that it's better for the man and for the company, and for the world.
"And yet there are men in business to-day who install systems to prevent the waste of a piece of paper or a stamp, and let the human labor in their plants go to waste wholesale. Yes, and they sat up and said I was a sentimental idiot when I put in my system of taking care of the men in my place. They said it would not pay. Well, let them look over the books of the Ford factory and see how it paid—how it paid all of us."
Five months after Ford s new plans had gone into effect his welfare workers made a second survey.
Eleven hundred men had moved to better homes. Bank deposits had increased 205 per cent. Twice as many men owned their own homes. More than two million dollars worth of Detroit real estate had passed into the hands of Ford employees, who were paying for it on the installment plan. Among the 18,000 workmen only 140 still lived in conditions which could be called "bad" in the reports.
And the output of Ford automobiles had increased over 20 per cent.
That year, with an eight-hour day in force, and $10,000,000 divided in extra profits among the men, the factory produced over 100,000 more cars than it had produced during the preceding year, under the old conditions.
Cold figures had proved to the business world the "practical" value of "sentimental theories." Ford's policy had not only done away with the labor problem, it had also shown the way to solve the employers problems.
"The heart of the struggle between capital and labor is the idea of employer and employee," he says. "There ought not to be employers and workmen—just workmen. They're two parts of the same machine. It's absurd to have a machine in which one part tries to foil another.
"My job at the plant is to design the cars and keep the departments working in harmony. I'm a workman. I'm not trying to slip anything over on the other factors in the machine. How would that help the plant?
"There's trouble between labor and capital. Well, the solution is not through one side getting the other by the neck and squeezing. No, sir; that isn't a solution; that is ruin for both. It means that later the other side is going to recover and try to get on top again, and there'll be constant fighting and jarring where there ought to be harmony and adjustment.
"The only solution is to get together. It can't come only by the demands of labor. It can't come only by the advantages of capital. It's got to come by both recognizing their interest and getting together.
"That's the solution of all the problems in the world, as I see it. Let people realize that they're all bound together, all parts of one machine, and that nothing that hurts one group of people will fail in the end to come back and hurt all the peopie."
So, at the end of thirty-seven years of work, Henry Ford sat in his office on his fifty-second birthday and looked out of a community of nearly 20,000 persons, working efficiently and happily together, working for him and for themselves, well paid, contented. He thought of the world, covered with the network of his agencies, crossed and recrossed with the tracks of his cars.
He had run counter to every prompting of "practical business judgment" all his life—he had left the farm, built his engine, left the moneyed men who would not let him build a cheap car, started his own plant on insufficient capital, built up his business, established his profit-sharing scheme—all against every dictate of established practice.
He had acted from the first on that one fundamental principle, "Do the thing that means the most good to the most people." His car, his factory, his workmen, his sixty millions of dollars, answered conclusively the objection, "I know it's the right thing, theoretically but it isn't practical."
Thinking of these things on that bright summer day in 1914, Ford decided that there remained only one more thing he could do.