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

“classes.” Before, when it was the constant effort of propaganda to make the people believe that it was only the “rich” who were without humane feelings, the opinion became general that among the “poor” the humane virtues flourished.

 

But the “rich” and the “poor” are both very small minorities, and you cannot classify society under such heads. There are not enough “rich”

and there are not enough “poor” to serve the purpose of such classification. Rich men have become poor without changing their natures, and poor men have become rich, and the problem has not been affected by it.

 

Between the rich and the poor is the great mass of the people who are neither rich nor poor. A society made up exclusively of millionaires would not be different from our present society; some of the millionaires would have to raise wheat and bake bread and make machinery and run trains—else they would all starve to death. Someone must do the work. Really we have no fixed classes. We have men who will work and men who will not. Most of the “classes” that one reads about are purely fictional. Take certain capitalist papers. You will be amazed by some of the statements about the labouring class. We who have been and still are a part of the labouring class know that the statements are untrue. Take certain of the labour papers. You are equally amazed by some of the statements they make about “capitalists.” And yet on both sides there is a grain of truth. The man who is a capitalist and nothing else, who gambles with the fruits of other men’s labours, deserves all that is said against him. He is in precisely the same class as the cheap gambler who cheats workingmen out of their wages. The statements we read about the labouring class in the capitalistic press are seldom written by managers of great industries, but by a class of writers who are writing what they think will please their employers. They write what they imagine will please. Examine the labour press and you will find another class of writers who similarly seek to tickle the prejudices which they conceive the labouring man to have. Both kinds of writers are mere propagandists. And propaganda that does not spread facts is self-destructive. And it should be. You cannot preach patriotism to men for the purpose of getting them to stand still while you rob them—and get away with that kind of preaching very long. You cannot preach the duty of working hard and producing plentifully, and make that a screen for an additional profit to yourself. And neither can the worker conceal the lack of a day’s work by a phrase.

 

Undoubtedly the employing class possesses facts which the employed ought to have in order to construct sound opinions and pass fair judgments.

Undoubtedly the employed possess facts which are equally important to the employer. It is extremely doubtful, however, if either side has all the facts. And this is where propaganda, even if it were possible for it to be entirely successful, is defective. It is not desirable that one set of ideas be “put over” on a class holding another set of ideas. What we really need is to get all the ideas together and construct from them.

 

Take, for instance, this whole matter of union labour and the right to strike.

 

The only strong group of union men in the country is the group that draws salaries from the unions. Some of them are very rich. Some of them are interested in influencing the affairs of our large institutions of finance. Others are so extreme in their so-called socialism that they border on Bolshevism and anarchism—their union salaries liberating them from the necessity of work so that they can devote their energies to subversive propaganda. All of them enjoy a certain prestige and power which, in the natural course of competition, they could not otherwise have won.

 

If the official personnel of the labour unions were as strong, as honest, as decent, and as plainly wise as the bulk of the men who make up the membership, the whole movement would have taken on a different complexion these last few years. But this official personnel, in the main—there are notable exceptions—has not devoted itself to an alliance with the naturally strong qualities of the workingman; it has rather devoted itself to playing upon his weaknesses, principally upon the weaknesses of that newly arrived portion of the population which does not yet know what Americanism is, and which never will know if left to the tutelage of their local union leaders.

 

The workingmen, except those few who have been inoculated with the fallacious doctrine of “the class war” and who have accepted the philosophy that progress consists in fomenting discord in industry (“When you get your $12 a day, don’t stop at that. Agitate for $14. When you get your eight hours a day, don’t be a fool and grow contented; agitate for six hours. Start something! Always start something!”), have the plain sense which enables them to recognize that with principles accepted and observed, conditions change. The union leaders have never seen that. They wish conditions to remain as they are, conditions of injustice, provocation, strikes, bad feeling, and crippled national life. Else where would be the need for union officers? Every strike is a new argument for them; they point to it and say, “You see! You still need us.”

 

The only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and starvation. The union of labour which is coming to the fore in this country is the union of all whose interests are interdependent—whose interests are altogether dependent on the usefulness and efficiency of the service they render.

 

There is a change coming. When the union of “union leaders” disappears, with it will go the union of blind bosses—bosses who never did a decent thing for their employees until they were compelled. If the blind boss was a disease, the selfish union leader was the antidote. When the union leader became the disease, the blind boss became the antidote. Both are misfits, both are out of place in well-organized society. And they are both disappearing together.

 

It is the blind boss whose voice is heard to-day saying, “Now is the time to smash labour, we’ve got them on the run.” That voice is going down to silence with the voice that preaches “class war.” The producers—from the men at the drawing board to the men on the moulding floor—have gotten together in a real union, and they will handle their own affairs henceforth.

 

The exploitation of dissatisfaction is an established business to-day.

Its object is not to settle anything, nor to get anything done, but to keep dissatisfaction in existence. And the instruments used to do this are a whole set of false theories and promises which can never be fulfilled as long as the earth remains what it is.

 

I am not opposed to labour organization. I am not opposed to any sort of organization that makes for progress. It is organizing to limit production—whether by employers or by workers—that matters.

 

The workingman himself must be on guard against some very dangerous notions—dangerous to himself and to the welfare of the country. It is sometimes said that the less a worker does, the more jobs he creates for other men. This fallacy assumes that idleness is creative. Idleness never created a job. It creates only burdens. The industrious man never runs his fellow worker out of a job; indeed, it is the industrious man who is the partner of the industrious manager—who creates more and more business and therefore more and more jobs. It is a great pity that the idea should ever have gone abroad among sensible men that by “soldiering” on the job they help someone else. A moment’s thought will show the weakness of such an idea. The healthy business, the business that is always making more and more opportunities for men to earn an honourable and ample living, is the business in which every man does a day’s work of which he is proud. And the country that stands most securely is the country in which men work honestly and do not play tricks with the means of production. We cannot play fast and loose with economic laws, because if we do they handle us in very hard ways.

 

The fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used to be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed. He is merely not employed on that work, and the public is not carrying the burden of his support by paying more than it ought on that work—for after all, it is the public that pays!

 

An industrial concern which is wide enough awake to reorganize for efficiency, and honest enough with the public to charge it necessary costs and no more, is usually such an enterprising concern that it has plenty of jobs at which to employ the tenth man. It is bound to grow, and growth means jobs. A well-managed concern is always seeking to lower the labour cost to the public; and it is certain to employ more men than the concern which loafs along and makes the public pay the cost of its mismanagement.

 

The tenth man was an unnecessary cost. The ultimate consumer was paying him. But the fact that he was unnecessary on that particular job does not mean that he is unnecessary in the work of the world, or even in the work of his particular shop.

 

The public pays for all mismanagement. More than half the trouble with the world to-day is the “soldiering” and dilution and cheapness and inefficiency for which the people are paying their good money. Wherever two men are being paid for what one can do, the people are paying double what they ought. And it is a fact that only a little while ago in the United States, man for man, we were not producing what we did for several years previous to the war.

 

A day’s work means more than merely being “on duty” at the shop for the required number of hours. It means giving an equivalent in service for the wage drawn. And when that equivalent is tampered with either way—when the man gives more than he receives, or receives more than he gives—it is not long before serious dislocation will be manifest.

Extend that condition throughout the country, and you have a complete upset of business. All that industrial difficulty means is the destruction of basic equivalents in the shop. Management must share the blame with labour. Management has been lazy, too. Management has found it easier to hire an additional five hundred men than to so improve its methods that one hundred men of the old force could be released to other work. The public was paying, and business was booming, and management didn’t care a pin. It was no different in the office from what it was in the shop. The law of equivalents was broken just as much by managers as by workmen. Practically nothing of importance is secured by mere demand.

That is why strikes always fail—even though they may seem to succeed. A strike which brings higher wages or shorter hours and passes on the burden to the community is really unsuccessful. It only makes the industry less able to serve—and decreases the number of jobs that it can support. This is not to say that no strike is justified—it may draw attention to an evil. Men can strike with justice—that they will thereby get justice is another question. The strike for