FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM
The Seldon patent fight had continued through all the early years of
Ford's struggle to establish himself in business. At last it was
settled. Ford won it. The whole industry was freed from an oppressive
tax and his long fight was over.
Immediately, of course, other cars came into the low-priced field. Other
manufacturers, tardily following Ford, began the downward pressure in
prices which now makes it possible for thousands of persons with only
moderate means to own automobiles. For the first time Ford faced
competition in his own price class. Innumerable business problems
confronted the farmer-mechanic, from the time he opened his office doors
in the early morning until the last workman had left the plant and only
his light was burning. Business men came, financiers, salesmen, lawyers,
designers. Every day for two hours he conferred with his superintendents
and foremen in the main factory. Every detail of the business was under
his supervision. A smaller man or a less simple one, would have been
absorbed by the sheer mass of work.
Ford settled every problem by his own simple rule, "Do what is
fundamentally best for everybody. It will work out for our interests in
the end."
And always he was pondering the big problem of putting back into active
use the millions that were accumulating to his credit. Every year the
price was lowered on his cars, following his original policy of making
the automobile cheap. Still the sales increased by leaps and bounds, and
his margin of profit on each car mounted into a greater total.
"The whole system is wrong," he says. "People have the wrong idea of
money. They think it is valuable in itself. They try to get all they
can, and they've built up a system where one man has too much and
another not enough. As long as that system is working there does not
seem any way to even things up. But I made up my mind to do what I
could.
"Money valuable? I tell you, gold is the least valuable metal in the
world. Edison says it is no good at all, it is too soft to make a single
useful article. Suppose there was only one loaf of bread in the world,
would all the money on earth buy it from the man who had it? Money
itself is nothing, absolutely nothing. It is only valuable as a
transmitter, a method of handling things that are valuable. The minute
one man gets more of it than he can use to buy the real things he needs,
the surplus is sheer waste. It is stored-up energy that is no good to
anybody.
"Every bit of energy that is wasted that way hurts the whole world, and
in the end it hurts the man who has it as much as it hurts anybody. Look
here, you make a machine to do something useful, don't you? Well, then,
if it is built so that it keeps wasting energy, doesn't the whole
machine wear itself out without doing half as much as it should? Isn't
that last energy bad for every part of the machine? Well, that is the
way the world is running now. The whole system is wrong."
A very little thought brings almost any of us to that conclusion,
especially if the thinker is one whose surplus money is all in the other
man's bank account; but Ford held to that thought, as few of us would,
with the surplus millions in his own hands. Furthermore, he proposed not
merely to think, but to act on that thought.
He is not a man to act hastily. Before he made his engine he worked out
the drawings. Before he distributed his money he selected 200 men from
the workers in his shop and sent them out to learn all they could of the
living conditions of the other thousands. They worked for a year, and at
the end of that time Ford, going carefully over their reports, saw
plainly where his surplus money should go.
Over 4,000 of the 18,000 men working in the Ford plant were living in
dire poverty, in unspeakable home conditions. Families were huddled into
tenements, where in wet weather water stood on the floor. Wives were
ill, uncared for; babies were dressed in rags. Another 5,000 men in his
employ were living in conditions which could only be called "fair." Only
364 out of 18,000 owned their own homes.
Yet the employees in the Ford shops were above the average of factory
workingmen. They were paid the regular scale of wages, not overworked,
and their surroundings at the plant were sanitary and pleasant.
In those terrible figures Ford was seeing merely the ordinary,
accustomed result of the wasted energy represented in those idle
millions of dollars.
He went over them thoroughly, noting that the scale of living grew
steadily better as the salaries increased, observing that the most
wretched class was mainly composed of foreign workmen, ignorant,
unskilled labor, most of them unable to speak English. He figured,
thought, drew his own conclusions.
He had been studying relief plans, methods of factory management in
Germany, welfare work of all kinds. When he had finished his
consideration of those reports he threw overboard all the plans other
people had made and announced his own.
"Every man who works for me is going to get enough for a comfortable
living," he said. "If an able-bodied man can't earn that, he's either
lazy or ignorant. If he's lazy, he's sick. We'll have a hospital. If
he's ignorant, he wants to learn. We'll have a school. Meantime, figure
out in the accounting bureau a scale of profit-sharing that will make
every man's earnings at least five dollars a day. The man that gets the
smallest wages gets the biggest share of the profits. He needs it most."
On January 12, 1914, Ford more than satisfied the expectant
manufacturers of the world. He launched into the industrial world a most
startling bombshell.
"Five dollars a day for every workman in the Ford factory!"
"He's crazy!" other manufacturers said, aghast. "Why, those dirty,
ignorant foreigners don't earn half that! You can't run a business that
way!"
"That man Ford will upset the whole industrial situation. What is he
trying to do, anyhow?" they demanded when every Detroit factory workman
grew restless.
The news spread rapidly. Everywhere workers dropped their tools and
hurried to the Ford factory. Five dollars a day!
When Ford reached the factory in the morning of the second day after his
announcement, he found Woodward avenue crowded with men waiting to get a
job in the shops. An hour later the crowds had jammed into a mob, which
massed outside the buildings and spread far into adjoining streets,
pushing, struggling, fighting to get closer to the doors.
It was not safe to open them. That mass of humanity, pushed from behind,
would have wrecked the offices. The manager of the employment department
opened a window and shouted to the frantic crowd that there were no
jobs, but the sound of his voice was lost in the roar that greeted him.
He shut the window and telephoned the police department for reserves.
Still the crowds increased every moment by new groups of men wildly
eager to get a job which would pay them a comfortable living. Ford
looked down at them from his window.
"Can't you make them understand we haven't any jobs?" he asked the
employment manager. The man, disheveled, breathing hard, and hoarse with
his efforts to make his voice heard, shook his head.
"The police are coming," he said.
"Then there'll be somebody hurt," Ford predicted. "We can't have that.
Get the fire hose and turn it on the crowd. That will do the business."
A moment later a solid two-inch stream of water shot from the doors of
the Ford factory. It swept the struggling men half off their feet;
knocked the breath from their bodies; left them gasping, startled,
dripping. They scattered. In a few moments the white stream from the
hose was sweeping back and forth over a widening space bare of men. When
the police arrived the crowd was so dispersed that the men in uniform
marched easily through it without using their clubs.
For a week a special force of policemen guarded the Ford factory,
turning back heartsick men, disappointed in their hope of a comfortable
living wage.
It was a graphic illustration of the harm done the whole machine by the
loss of energy stored in money, held idle in the hands of a few men.