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

proper conditions and just rewards is justifiable. The pity is that men should be compelled to use the strike to get what is theirs by right. No American ought to be compelled to strike for his rights. He ought to receive them naturally, easily, as a matter of course. These justifiable strikes are usually the employer’s fault. Some employers are not fit for their jobs. The employment of men—the direction of their energies, the arranging of their rewards in honest ratio to their production and to the prosperity of the business—is no small job. An employer may be unfit for his job, just as a man at the lathe may be unfit. Justifiable strikes are a sign that the boss needs another job—one that he can handle. The unfit employer causes more trouble than the unfit employee.

You can change the latter to another more suitable job. But the former must usually be left to the law of compensation. The justified strike, then, is one that need never have been called if the employer had done his work.

 

There is a second kind of strike—the strike with a concealed design. In this kind of strike the workingmen are made the tools of some manipulator who seeks his own ends through them. To illustrate: Here is a great industry whose success is due to having met a public need with efficient and skillful production. It has a record for justice. Such an industry presents a great temptation to speculators. If they can only gain control of it they can reap rich benefit from all the honest effort that has been put into it. They can destroy its beneficiary wage and profit-sharing, squeeze every last dollar out of the public, the product, and the workingman, and reduce it to the plight of other business concerns which are run on low principles. The motive may be the personal greed of the speculators or they may want to change the policy of a business because its example is embarrassing to other employers who do not want to do what is right. The industry cannot be touched from within, because its men have no reason to strike. So another method is adopted. The business may keep many outside shops busy supplying it with material. If these outside shops can be tied up, then that great industry may be crippled.

 

So strikes are fomented in the outside industries. Every attempt is made to curtail the factory’s source of supplies. If the workingmen in the outside shops knew what the game was, they would refuse to play it, but they don’t know; they serve as the tools of designing capitalists without knowing it. There is one point, however, that ought to rouse the suspicions of workingmen engaged in this kind of strike. If the strike cannot get itself settled, no matter what either side offers to do, it is almost positive proof that there is a third party interested in having the strike continue. That hidden influence does not want a settlement on any terms. If such a strike is won by the strikers, is the lot of the workingman improved? After throwing the industry into the hands of outside speculators, are the workmen given any better treatment or wages?

 

There is a third kind of strike—the strike that is provoked by the money interests for the purpose of giving labour a bad name. The American workman has always had a reputation for sound judgment. He has not allowed himself to be led away by every shouter who promised to create the millennium out of thin air. He has had a mind of his own and has used it. He has always recognized the fundamental truth that the absence of reason was never made good by the presence of violence. In his way the American workingman has won a certain prestige with his own people and throughout the world. Public opinion has been inclined to regard with respect his opinions and desires. But there seems to be a determined effort to fasten the Bolshevik stain on American Labour by inciting it to such impossible attitudes and such wholly unheard-of actions as shall change public sentiment from respect to criticism.

Merely avoiding strikes, however, does not promote industry. We may say to the workingman:

 

“You have a grievance, but the strike is no remedy—it only makes the situation worse whether you win or lose.”

 

Then the workingman may admit this to be true and refrain from striking.

Does that settle anything?

 

No! If the worker abandons strikes as an unworthy means of bringing about desirable conditions, it simply means that employers must get busy on their own initiative and correct defective conditions.

 

The experience of the Ford industries with the workingman has been entirely satisfactory, both in the United States and abroad. We have no antagonism to unions, but we participate in no arrangements with either employee or employer organizations. The wages paid are always higher than any reasonable union could think of demanding and the hours of work are always shorter. There is nothing that a union membership could do for our people. Some of them may belong to unions, probably the majority do not. We do not know and make no attempt to find out, for it is a matter of not the slightest concern to us. We respect the unions, sympathize with their good aims and denounce their bad ones. In turn I think that they give us respect, for there has never been any authoritative attempt to come between the men and the management in our plants. Of course radical agitators have tried to stir up trouble now and again, but the men have mostly regarded them simply as human oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort of interest that they would have in a four-legged man.

 

In England we did meet the trades union question squarely in our Manchester plant. The workmen of Manchester are mostly unionized, and the usual English union restrictions upon output prevail. We took over a body plant in which were a number of union carpenters. At once the union officers asked to see our executives and arrange terms. We deal only with our own employees and never with outside representatives, so our people refused to see the union officials. Thereupon they called the carpenters out on strike. The carpenters would not strike and were expelled from the union. Then the expelled men brought suit against the union for their share of the benefit fund. I do not know how the litigation turned out, but that was the end of interference by trades union officers with our operations in England.

 

We make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. It is absolutely a give-and-take relation. During the period in which we largely increased wages we did have a considerable supervisory force.

The home life of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find out what they did with their wages. Perhaps at the time it was necessary; it gave us valuable information. But it would not do at all as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned.

 

We do not believe in the “glad hand,” or the professionalized “personal touch,” or “human element.” It is too late in the day for that sort of thing. Men want something more than a worthy sentiment. Social conditions are not made out of words. They are the net result of the daily relations between man and man. The best social spirit is evidenced by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all.

That is the only way to prove good intentions and win respect.

Propaganda, bulletins, lectures—they are nothing. It is the right act sincerely done that counts.

 

A great business is really too big to be human. It grows so large as to supplant the personality of the man. In a big business the employer, like the employee, is lost in the mass. Together they have created a great productive organization which sends out articles that the world buys and pays for in return money that provides a livelihood for everyone in the business. The business itself becomes the big thing.

 

There is something sacred about a big business which provides a living for hundreds and thousands of families. When one looks about at the babies coming into the world, at the boys and girls going to school, at the young workingmen who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying and setting up for themselves, at the thousands of homes that are being paid for on installments out of the earnings of men—when one looks at a great productive organization that is enabling all these things to be done, then the continuance of that business becomes a holy trust. It becomes greater and more important than the individuals.

 

The employer is but a man like his employees and is subject to all the limitations of humanity. He is justified in holding his job only as he can fill it. If he can steer the business straight, if his men can trust him to run his end of the work properly and without endangering their security, then he is filling his place. Otherwise he is no more fit for his position than would be an infant. The employer, like everyone else, is to be judged solely by his ability. He may be but a name to the men—a name on a signboard. But there is the business—it is more than a name. It produces the living—and a living is a pretty tangible thing.

The business is a reality. It does things. It is a going concern. The evidence of its fitness is that the pay envelopes keep coming.

 

You can hardly have too much harmony in business. But you can go too far in picking men because they harmonize. You can have so much harmony that there will not be enough of the thrust and counterthrust which is life—enough of the competition which means effort and progress. It is one thing for an organization to be working harmoniously toward one object, but it is another thing for an organization to work harmoniously with each individual unit of itself. Some organizations use up so much energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they have no force left to work for the object for which the organization was created. The organization is secondary to the object. The only harmonious organization that is worth anything is an organization in which all the members are bent on the one main purpose—to get along toward the objective. A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely desired—that is the great harmonizing principle.

 

I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have “an atmosphere of good feeling” around him before he can do his work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on “feeling,” they are failures. Not only are they business failures; they are character failures also; it is as if their bones never attained a sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet.

There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business organizations. People have too great a fondness for working with the people they like. In the end it spoils a good many valuable qualities.

 

Do not misunderstand me; when I use the term “good feeling” I mean that habit of making one’s personal likes and dislikes the sole standard of judgment. Suppose you do not like a man. Is that anything against him?

It may be something against you. What have your likes or dislikes to do with the facts? Every man of common sense knows that there are men whom