Happy Labor Day, everyone! Get one last use of those white pants before the government comes and confiscates them all, as is 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.
In honor of Labor Day, the Hammering Man animated sculpture in front of the Seattle Are Museum takes a break for one day, every year, on Labor Day.
Hammering Man – Wikipedia
A kinda divey bar in the nearby University District had a 1/10-scale version out front with the hammer replaced with a beer can called “Getting Hammered Man.”
I don’t know if it’s still there, but I hope it is.
We actually spent Labor Day at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. The workers were, of course, laboring.
“Henry Ford himself, a man not exactly known for his love of fun.”
oh how I beg to differ! Old Man Ford would host regular old-timey dances featuring music and moves from his youth (1800s….). None of that new fangled Jazz and doing The Charleston crap, but proper dances like Quadrilles and Square dancing. if that aint fun on a bun then call me buster!
That $5 a day (with multiple stipulations) might have been nice, but Ol’ Henry didn’t really have much love for labor. His was the last major automaker to finally sign a union contract as I’ve heard it. Took him until the ’40s.
Happy Labor Day!
I made the corny jokes w/ my wife:
“So, today do we do hard labor all day? Wait, what about those who are expecting and go into labor all day…on Labor Day?! That just fits so well!”
She just…sighed and rolled her eyes…
Finally knocked out the bike oil and air filter change. I had been dreading it based on a video I watched and I have no idea what the hell that guy was doing. It was the seat and four bolts for basically-trim.
I spent five times longer fishing for the (non magnetic) bolt I dropped than I did actually changing the filter.
I’ll be laboring at my job today, as my department (due to the 24/7 nature of banking these days) does not get holidays off. I will, however, collect double time as a result. Also, the building has no power as a new generator is currently being wired in, so working from home on top of that. Since 99% of the bank’s employees were off today they figured the long weekend was the best time to get that done. If it were up to my boss, we’d all work from home every day, but it’s not up to him.
Labor Day weekend always has room for a few Jimmy Buffett albums.
The live recordings “ you had to be there “ and “Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays” are always in the mix.
Labor Day Monday geauxs like every Monday…. Do the laundry and cook up some red beans and rice 🙂
Can we have drug-fueled orgies of hedonism and debauchery at the next Autopian meeting? Maybe some reporting as well
reporting is optional 🙂
How many times do you have to hear someone say “happy Labor Day” before it becomes Belabor Day.
I spent the weekend replacing my alternator, timing belt and water pump on my project car. Everything came apart very smoothly. No bolts were seized. I kept everything labeled and in order, so I could put things back together correctly. I put the new water pump on and torqued one bolt to spec, then the next, and then the next and then the last one snapped off. Damn. Pulled it back off, was able to get the broken bolt out with pliers. Made a new gasket. Located a bolt that would work. Repeated the process. Snapped another (old) bolt. Checked setting on torque wrench. Torque spec is 14 lbs. I had my wrench set at 13. Pulled pump off. Broken bolt out with pliers. Locate another bolt. Make another gasket. Put it back together. Torqued to spec. Woo hoo! nothing broke! Put new timing belt on, put everything back together. Put top bolt in cooling system to block Tee. Put bottom bolt in. Oh sh… hole threads are stripped. Borrow tap kit from neighbor. Rethread hole. Go purchase new bolt. Put it back together. Whew! all the bits are back together. Put coolant in. Turn on motor. Look for drips. Damn! water pump gasket is leaking. Put cover on car. Go in the house.
Happy Labor day everyone. Hopefully you’re able to relax and have a good one.
Wow, that sounds extremely frustrating…good luck though! (when you “labor” on it another day) It would have been nice if every bolt ever made was made to never break (“only in a perfect world” and all that) but that means using metal that’s stronger but costs way more.
I made the corny jokes w/ my wife:
“So, today do we do hard labor all day? Wait, what about those who are expecting and go into labor all day…on Labor Day?! That just fits so well!”
She just…sighed and rolled her eyes…
We actually enjoy a lot of other jokes together though; and I educate her on cars while driving her crazy about car stuff all at the same time!
Ha ha ha ha ha
Happy Labor Day!
I’m not too frustrated about it. Yeah, I have to take it apart and re-do it, but not until next weekend. I ordered new gaskets instead of trying to make them, and to round it out so I’m not paying $21 shipping for $7 of gaskets, I ordered spark plugs and wires, as well as a couple new screws for the water pump.
That’s great! That’s the smart way to do it. Yeah, when I read it I jumped to “extremely frustrating” when it doesn’t have to be when the mindset is there to control that. There’s always going to be some of it that’s unavoidable, but that’s part of doing car repairs, house repairs, etc and in general (Years ago w/ all my shitboxes I’ve had I would let myself get extremely frustrated and had to take breaks, reassess and then try to do repairs calmly) Plus, it’s something enthusiasts want to do (anyone, of course…who would like to get into it) that can be an enjoyable and passionate hobby/part of life. Didn’t mean to “preach” or whatever; just that currently I’ve been getting frustrated over even little things in general lately and in the process of learning to control my reactions and learn a better mindset. I really need to get back into actually working on cars more since I enjoy it; just basic stuff now, but used to do more.
Anyway, again: good luck w/ everything!
I took it how you intended, comisseration, not preachyness. I’ve struggled with “extremely frustrated” from time to time, but as I get older I guess I’m realizing that when you get extremely frustrated, you’ll probably make things worse, not better. It also helps that I don’t need this car to get to work, so I am not really under any pressure to have it finished and I can just let it be a hobby.
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.
Thank you. That’s exactly what I took from your comment and I do agree.
Federal tax brackets in 1918 would put someone making $4k/y at 12%
But, it peaked out at 77%, for the top tax brackets (with tax brackets increasing all the way to incomes of $1M in 1918!!!)
A far cry from taxes today, which peak at 32%, whose tax brackets don’t even come close to matching $1M in 1918’s money.
The top marginal tax rate in 1944-1945 was 94%, and from 1951-1963 was 91% or above.
Comparing wages to the price of precious metals is meaningless. Precious metals are traded on the market, and prices are volatile and subject to speculation. The only meaningful comparison is to compare wages to the cost of living at the time: housing, food, clothing, and other necessity costs.
I thought income taxes were implemented in 1913
They did, but one neeed to make $3,000/yr or more before there was anything to pay. Ford’s $5/day wage didn’t cross that threshold.
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?
Well, it probably counts as drug fueled, but I’m not seeing an orgy of hedonism. Try harder.
Exactly! Plus, no battery acid inhalation by chainsaw? No dice
I was just breathing some ABS fumes while using a soldering iron to “modify” a custom part on my 3D printer after a past mod conflicted with the new toolchanger mod I’ve been working on. Any points for that?
If you use MEK to clean the board, Bonus Points!
What I’m listening to while reading this article? After the Gold Rush, by Neal Young.
Very nice, very nice.
“Moonflower” (Disc 2) by Santana here.
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!