My Life and Work by Henry Ford (surface ebook reader TXT) 📖

What do we mean by high wages, anyway?

We mean a higher wage than was paid ten months or ten years ago. We do not mean a higher wage than ought to be paid. Our high wages of to-day may be low wages ten years from now.

If it is right for the manager of a business to try to make it pay larger dividends, it is quite as right that he should try to make it pay higher wages. But it is not the manager of the business who pays the high wages. Of course, if he can and will not, then the blame is on him.

But he alone can never make high wages possible. High wages cannot be paid unless the workmen earn them. Their labour is the productive factor. It is not the only productive factor—poor management can waste labour and material and nullify the efforts of labour. Labour can nullify the results of good management. But in a partnership of skilled management and honest labour, it is the workman who makes high wages possible. He invests his energy and skill, and if he makes an honest, wholehearted investment, high wages ought to be his reward. Not only has he earned them, but he has had a big part in creating them.

It ought to be clear, however, that the high wage begins down in the shop. If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work. Nature has seen to that. Idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us. Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation.

So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing. Exact social justice flows only out of honest work. The man who contributes much should take away much. Therefore no element of charity is present in the paying of wages. The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. And he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition of his contribution. The man who comes to the day’s job feeling that no matter how much he may give, it will not yield him enough of a return to keep him beyond want, is not in shape to do his day’s work. He is anxious and worried, and it all reacts to the detriment of his work.

But if a man feels that his day’s work is not only supplying his basic need, but is also giving him a margin of comfort and enabling him to give his boys and girls their opportunity and his wife some pleasure in life, then his job looks good to him and he is free to give it of his best. This is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business.

The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day’s work is losing the best part of his pay.

For the day’s work is a great thing—a very great thing! It is at the very foundation of the world; it is the basis of our self-respect. And the employer ought constantly to put in a harder day’s work than any of his men. The employer who is seriously trying to do his duty in the world must be a hard worker. He cannot say, “I have so many thousand men working for me.” The fact of the matter is that so many thousand men have him working for them—and the better they work the busier they keep him disposing of their products. Wages and salaries are in fixed amounts, and this must be so, in order to have a basis to figure on.

Wages and salaries are a sort of profit-sharing fixed in advance, but it often happens that when the business of the year is closed, it is discovered that more can be paid. And then more ought to be paid. When we are all in the business working together, we all ought to have some share in the profits—by way of a good wage, or salary, or added compensation. And that is beginning now quite generally to be recognized.

There is now a definite demand that the human side of business be elevated to a position of equal importance with the material side. And that is going to come about. It is just a question whether it is going to be brought about wisely—in a way that will conserve the material side which now sustains us, or unwisely and in such a way as shall take from us all the benefit of the work of the past years. Business represents our national livelihood, it reflects our economic progress, and gives us our place among other nations. We do not want to jeopardize that. What we want is a better recognition of the human element in business. And surely it can be achieved without dislocation, without loss to any one, indeed with an increase of benefit to every human being. And the secret of it all is in a recognition of human partnership. Until each man is absolutely sufficient unto himself, needing the services of no other human being in any capacity whatever, we shall never get beyond the need of partnership.

Such are the fundamental truths of wages. They are partnership distributions.

When can a wage be considered adequate? How much of a living is reasonably to be expected from work? Have you ever considered what a wage does or ought to do? To say that it should pay the cost of living is to say almost nothing. The cost of living depends largely upon the efficiency of production and transportation; and the efficiency of these is the sum of the efficiencies of the management and the workers. Good work, well managed, ought to result in high wages and low living costs.

If we attempt to regulate wages on living costs, we get nowhere. The cost of living is a result and we cannot expect to keep a result constant if we keep altering the factors which produce the result. When we try to regulate wages according to the cost of living, we are imitating a dog chasing his tail. And, anyhow, who is competent to say just what kind of living we shall base the costs on? Let us broaden our view and see what a wage is to the workmen—and what it ought to be.

The wage carries all the worker’s obligations outside the shop; it carries all that is necessary in the way of service and management inside the shop. The day’s productive work is the most valuable mine of wealth that has ever been opened. Certainly it ought to bear not less than all the worker’s outside obligations. And certainly it ought to be made to take care of the worker’s sunset days when labour is no longer possible to him—and should be no longer necessary. And if it is made to do even these, industry will have to be adjusted to a schedule of production, distribution, and reward, which will stop the leaks into the pockets of men who do not assist in production. In order to create a system which shall be as independent of the good-will of benevolent employers as of the ill-will of selfish ones, we shall have to find a basis in the actual facts of life itself.

It costs just as much physical strength to turn out a day’s work when wheat is $1 a bushel, as when wheat is $2.50 a bushel. Eggs may be 12

cents a dozen or 90 cents a dozen. What difference does it make in the units of energy a man uses in a productive day’s work? If only the man himself were concerned, the cost of his maintenance and the profit he ought to have would be a simple matter. But he is not just an individual. He is a citizen, contributing to the welfare of the nation.

He is a householder. He is perhaps a father with children who must be reared to usefulness on what he is able to earn. We must reckon with all these facts. How are you going to figure the contribution of the home to the day’s work? You pay the man for his work, but how much does that work owe to his home? How much to his position as a citizen? How much to his position as a father? The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. The shop must pay them both. On what system of figuring is the home going to find its place on the cost sheets of the day’s work? Is the man’s own livelihood to be regarded as the “cost”? And is his ability to have a home and family the “profit”?

Is the profit on a day’s work to be computed on a cash basis only, measured by the amount a man has left over after his own and his family’s wants are all supplied? Or are all these relationships to be considered strictly under head of cost, and the profit to be computed entirely outside of them? That is, after having supported himself and family, clothed them, housed them, educated them, given them the privileges incident to their standard of living, ought there to be provision made for still something more in the way of savings profit?

And are all properly chargeable to the day’s work? I think they are.

Otherwise, we have the hideous prospect of little children and their mothers being forced out to work.

These are questions which call for accurate observation and computation.

Perhaps there is no one item connected with our economic life that would surprise us more than a knowledge of just what burdens the day’s work.

It is perhaps possible accurately to determine—albeit with considerable interference with the day’s work itself—how much energy the day’s work takes out of a man. But it is not at all possible accurately to determine how much it will require to put back that energy into him against the next day’s demands. Nor is it possible to determine how much of that expended energy he will never be able to get back at all.

Economics has never yet devised a sinking fund for the replacement of the strength of a worker. It is possible to set up a kind of sinking fund in the form of old-age pensions. But pensions do not attend to the profit which each day’s labour ought to yield in order to take care of all of life’s overhead, of all physical losses, and of the inevitable deterioration of the manual worker.

The best wages that have up to date ever been paid are not nearly as high as they ought to be. Business is not yet sufficiently well organized and its objectives are not yet sufficiently clear to make it possible to pay more than a fraction of the wages that ought to be paid.

That is part of the work we have before us. It does not help toward a solution to talk about abolishing the wage system and substituting communal ownership. The wage system is the only one that we have, under which contributions to production can be rewarded according to their worth. Take away the wage measure and we shall have universal injustice.

Perfect the system and we may have universal justice.

I have learned through the years a good deal about wages. I believe in the first place that, all other considerations aside, our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay. If we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent and