Happy Labor Day, everyone! Get one last use of those white pants before the government comes and confiscates them all, as it Labor Day tradition. I like to do an oil change in white pants on Labor Day, just because. Why should I give up pristine, clean white pants? Screw that.
Anyway, it’s Labor Day, which means we’re going to celebrate labor and the Workers of the World by giving the Workers of the Autopian the day off! There will still be some stories here and there, but overall, we’d like all of our hard-working car-obsessives to take the day off to relax however they see fit, whether that be acts of service, time with family, personal growth projects, or drug-fueled orgies of hedonism and debauchery. Or some combination of all that.
I hope all of you get some time to relax and do whatever you choose, and if you’d like something automotive to reflect upon while you’re painting a tasteful nude or gardening or volunteering at the animal shelter or doing a fat rail of some manner of powder, here’s something to consider:
Back in 1914, Ford first initiated their policy of paying their workers $5 per eight-hour day, more than doubling the old wage of $2.34 for a nine-hour workday. This comes to about a $20/hour salary in modern money, and was finally enough that Ford’s workers could actually afford the cars they were building.
Prior to the $5 work day, turnover for employees was incredibly high, as the monotony of assembly line work was hard for many workers to adapt to, despite how efficient the process was for the company – after all, changes in production meant that the time it took to build a Model T dropped from 12½ hours to a just 93 minutes. For many, though, the repetitive work just wasn’t worth it at $2.34/day. But at $5? That changed things.
There was another catch, though, one that may remind us that corporate overreach is not anything new. To qualify for the $5/day rate, workers had to adhere to a set of moral rules established by Henry Ford himself, a man not exactly known for his love of fun. From the Henry Ford Museum’s site:
“To qualify for the pay increase, workers had to abstain from alcohol, not physically abuse their families, not take in boarders, keep their homes clean, and contribute regularly to a savings account. Moral righteousness and prudent saving were all well and good, but they were not generally an employer’s business—at least not outside of working hours. In contrast, Ford Motor Company inspectors came to workers’ homes, asked probing questions, and observed general living conditions. If “violations” were discovered, the inspectors offered advice and pointed the families to resources offered through the company. Not until these problems were corrected did the employee receive his full bonus.”
Was that worth it? Maybe? I guess a lot of that would depend on how skilled you are at hiding your booze.
Anyway, despite this strange bit of ethical policing, the higher wages were a step in the right direction, but, as you know, the struggle never ends.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to ask our employees if their holiday debauchery meets our exacting standards.
I will be doing the most Labor Day thing of all. I’m going to the annual Labor Day Picnic that is held at the Union Hall of the union that I’ve been a member of since 1993.
“Get one last use of those white pants before the government comes and confiscates them all, as it Labor Day tradition.”
Proofreaders must have the day off. 🙂
$5/day was about 4.45 ounces of silver and 0.55 ounces of copper per day. Current spot price for an ounce of silver is $66.47, and an ounce of copper $0.42.
Henry Ford paying workers $5 per 8-hour work day in 1914 would have a true purchasing power roughly the equivalent of $41.80 per hour in today’s terms. For monotonous monkey work done by people with barely an 8th grade education. This was in 1914, before automation, before computers, before robotics, before AI, before JIT logistics, and all of the other technological advancements that have been used to boost worker productivity that have occured since. AND that $41.80/hr didn’t have income taxes or other deductions taken out of it. And these low-tier workers could afford to own homes without being in debt for 30 years, buy new cars, and start families, with plenty of money left over to save, invest, or retire off of.
There’s no shortage of college-educated adults that don’t make anywhere NEAR that amount of money in the present day USA even after all of the advancements made over the course of more than a century. Let the implications of that sink in.
I’m not checking your economics but I am appreciating your Labor Day screed.
I was making a comment on currency debasement and the purchasing power of an hour of basic labor at a job that even someone with a 70 IQ can be trained to do, not necessarily the economy in general, then comparing that purchasing power before and then after exponential increases occured in the productivity of said hour of labor over more than a century.
The metal content in $1 of silver quarters bought roughly the same amount of necessities of life(food, shelter, ect) back then as those metals buy today. Monkeywork at a Ford plant assembling Model Ts with hand tools and training so minimal that an illiterate person could do the job paid THAT much in metals, when today debt-slave college-educated people mostly don’t make anything near that in the most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen.
That is something to think about this labor day. We can definitely do better as a society, but then that would mean we would no longer have an unelected aristocracy appropriating the entire productive output of the human race for itself.
I’ll be laboring on my car today eliminating more of the 20 year old plastic cooling system bits. I had already replaced a number of the easy ones when I purchased it. Unfortunately the block to manifold elbow has one bolt that just isn’t accessible with the intake on. Also emanating from the underside of the intake is a bent “S” shaped small hose that have failed on others. Because it is 20 years old that hose is not available and the 180 degree bends with tight clearances made it highly unlikely that a piece of straight hose wouldn’t kink.
So I did some research and found a few people DIY heat molding straight hose to copy OE hoses or for custom applications. Now I couldn’t match the square corners on the one end but a U made it work. Now the hose does spring back a bit upon removing the form but when put back in place it does not kink. Super happy with how it turned out.
Just need to fight the spring clamp off of the degas bottle hose, replace the bottle, fill and put the covers back in place. So hopefully I’ll be driving it this afternoon!.
The social policing was very much of the times. Remember, this was peak temperance and Prohibition.
Although it sounds crazy to us today, temperance was a legit reaction to a massive problem of the late 1800s – men would work miserable hours at miserable jobs, get paid Friday, stop at the saloon on the way home and drink away their paycheck, then go home broke to a hungry family and beat them in a drunken rage.
Temperance was intended to fight this social plague and was backed up by many churches. Like all things, taken to an extreme it was unhealthy, as prohibition’s failure demonstrated. But overall, temperance did greatly reduce binge drinking and the attendant social problems.
Fun fact – Methodists were very committed to temperance, but also struggled with how to serve communion without wine in the era before widespread refrigeration. Plain ol’ grape juice would turn into vinegar (or wine) left to its own devices. A New Jersey dentist and Methodist communion steward figured out how to pasteurize grape juice. It was marketed as Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Communion Wine. The company is still around, but they’ve simplified the name and broadened the marketing. :^D
Fun fact #2 – the United Methodist General Board of Church & Society is the only non-government building on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. It was originally built as headquarters for the denomination’s temperance lobby. Located between the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the senate office building, it has a classic little 3-line church sign out front which GBCS uses to prompt our nation’s leaders to do the right thing. (Clearly, many of them don’t read it.)
Yeah, very much so that there were serious social ills borne of such drinking but the thing is that Henry Ford was not so much earnestly concerned about ameliorating such social ills as he was keenly interested in finding ways to avoid paying his workers fair wages…
A bit of both I think. He certainly did have an interest in sober, reliable workers, and probably a typical rural Protestant interest in clean-living families. He (and especially his goons) went way overboard in enforcement.
Does getting buzzed on secondary inhalation of carb cleaner count as a drug fueled orgy of hedonism?
What I’m listening to while reading this article? After the Gold Rush, by Neal Young.
Somewhere along the way I heard that a popular investment strategy among the employees was “houses and lots”.
Whore houses and lots of whiskey.
Yeah, the Henry Ford Museum has a pretty strong interest in being, uh, carefully neutral about history, lol.
“Ford Motor Company inspectors” would often show up at employees’ houses during work hours and strike up friendly conversations with the spouses working at home and get themselves invited inside for tea whereupon they’d casually ask deceptively probing questions where the spouses wouldn’t always realize what they were actually up to…
Furthermore, Ford’s goons would actually rummage through the trash cans outside employees’ houses looking for empty beer/liquor bottles, cigar/cigarette boxes, etc, etc.
It ended up that only some 3% (yes, 3%!!) ever actually received the full $5/day when it was first “implemented.”
My dad, who was born and grew up in Detroit, worked briefly at DeSoto as a teenager in the late 1940s, my grandfather had a long career in woodworking at Fisher Body from the 1930s to the ’50s, and my uncle worked for four decades on the assembly lines at Chrysler before retiring in the early 1970s; the family household was also a union household. Family lore always included a fairly well-known observation about how Henry Ford might have been the first to pay $5 a day but he was also the *last* to do so.
Yeah, needless to say, not too much love was lost for Henry Ford among my family because of what they actually saw in Detroit…
My Labor Day is off to an ignominious start. Monday is trash day, but since it’s a holiday, no trash pickup, right?
WRONG!!!
Oh well.
At least the cans aren’t full. We’ll be good for another week.
I’m celebrating labor day by rotating the tires and changing the oil and filters in my truck.
Yesterday we had a family day trip in San Francisco. It was really fun! There weren’t a ton of people out and we able to easily park in Golden Gate park and down by ocean beach.
Enjoy your day off!
This was pre Reefer Madness, so…..
…Happy Labor Day?
Day 3 with my kids, and it’s been amazing so far.
One thing that jumps out is how much they are into cars despite not being into cars. Osmosis is a very real thing with our kids when it’s not always obvious.
White pants, white shirt, black tightie-whities, black wife beater, bright red shoes. That is today’s outfit.
Happy Labor Day to all!
And to all a good night!