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 payroll 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 another 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 people."
So, at the end of thirty-seven years of work, Henry Ford sat in his
office on his fifty-second birthday and looked out on 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.