The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 / Edition 1

by Stephen Meyer III

Overview

In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in a small Detroit workshop. Five years later, he introduced the Model T and met with extraordinary commercial success. Between 1910 and 1914, he developed mass production and made the conveyor a symbol of the auto-industrial age. Then, in 1914, Ford acquired an overnight reputation as humanitarian, philanthropist and social reformer; and simultaneously infuriated the business community and stunned social reformers with his announcement of the outrageous Five Dollar Day.

More than simply high-wage policy, the Five Dollar Day attempted to solve attitudinal and behavioral problems with an effort to change the worker's domestic environment. Half of the five dollars represented "wages" and the other half was called "profits"-which the worker received only when he met specific standards of efficiency and home life that accorded with the ideal of an American way of life which the company felt was the basis for industrial efficiency.

The unique and short-lived Ford program did not succeed, yet its significance as an early managerial strategy goes beyond the boundaries of success or failure. The Ford Motor Company was uniquely situated in the historical evolution of labor management and industrial technology, and this readable study of that evolution, which highlights the Ford workers, is a chapter in the larger history of labor and work in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780873955096
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	06/30/1981
Series:	Suny Series in American Social History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1320L (what's this?)

About the Author

Stephen Meyer III, Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is one of the new historians who have begun to address the profound social impact of technology on the world of work.

Table of Contents

List of Tables
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
2. The Evolution of the New Industrial Technology
3. The Social Impact of the New Technology at the Workplace
4. Ford Labor Problems: Immigrant and Working-Class Traditions
5. Toward Modern Labor Management: The Lee Reforms and the Five Dollar Day
6. The Ford Sociological Investigations
7. Assembly-Line Americanization
8. The End of Ford Paternalism: World War, Labor Militancy, and Political Repression
9. Conclusion

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index