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Volvo: Safety Beyond the Star RatingsHow Automotive Workers Transformed the Way We Work
A look back at how the car industry, and specifically automotive workers, transformed the way America went to work then and now.
The 40-Hour Work Week
These days, the 5-day, 40-hour work week is business as usual, but that wasn’t always the case. Going back to the mid-19th century, working at least 70 hours – and up to 100 – for six days was the norm in the mechanized factories that boomed following the Industrial Revolution.
Turns out, automotive workers and their respective employers were responsible for transforming the way Americans work from those grueling hours to how it’s done today. To some degree, it can be traced to Henry Ford’s famous phrase, “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”
From Hand Built to Mass Produced
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, automotive workers generally worked in small teams to build cars by hand. These highly skilled workers brought together the various components needed to make a vehicle that was sourced from a host of outside companies.
It was the same method used in Europe and one that resulted in vehicles with a high degree of variation from one to the next. It was also a slow and expensive process that meant the burgeoning automobile industry primarily dealt with wealthy customers, which translated to low sales volumes.
To move past this approach would require a manufacturing process known as mass production. Henry Leland, founder of Cadillac, was one of the early pioneers in automotive mass production, a process that combined precise tolerances, standardized and interchangeable components, and synchronization across the vehicle build.
This “American system of manufacture” was displayed by Mr. Leland in 1908 at a meeting of the British Royal Automobile Club in London. Three Cadillacs were disassembled, the parts were shuffled about, several dozen components were removed and replaced with dealer stock, the cars were put back together, and then driven some 500 miles without issue.
Ford’s Transformative Assembly Line
But it was Henry Ford, founder of the eponymous company, that went a step further by adding in a moving assembly line to the mass production method. Borrowing a model used by slaughterhouses, Mr. Ford ultimately set up his factory with a network of conveyor belts that brought the product to the workers. It took experimentation to get the system running smoothly, but between 1913 and 1914, the time needed to build a Ford Model T dropped from over 12 hours to just over 90 minutes.
It was all thanks to the automotive workers being able to perform a single job with a high degree of efficiency. Which is where the phrase “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black” comes from. Ford, recognizing the tremendous potential of this new method, allowed very few variations between Model Ts to ensure the assembly line could run with few interruptions and keep costs down. By offering a single paint color, he could control the production process that much more carefully.
Supply Chain Integration
But that’s not the only way Henry Ford and his company helped shape the way Americans work. In 1910, a second Ford production plant was opened to meet soaring demand for the Ford Model T. Sitting on 102 acres, it was the largest manufacturing facility in the world at the time as it combined administrative offices, the assembly line, a self-contained power plant, and even the foundry on one campus.
Over the years, Ford would continue to diversify with the goal of owning the entire production process from the raw materials and energy resources required to build the vehicles to the trucks and trains used to deliver the finished cars. The company even owned a rubber plantation in Brazil to ensure a cheaper and more consistent supply of the material for its cars. This novel approach to a vertically integrated supply chain was a major driver of Ford’s early automotive industry dominance. As that success continued to grow, Mr. Ford was faced with another challenge – turnover.
$5.00 A Day
The story of Henry Ford instituting a $5.00 per day wage is frequently told under the auspices of Ford paying its workers enough to buy the cars it was building. Though creating a built-in customer base was certainly a side effect, this outrageous new wage – the average at the time was just $2.25 per day – was actually intended to lower worker turnover. Building cars was, and is, hard work, so Ford needed a way to retain the people it had already spent time and money training.
However, that $5.00 per day rate was actually split in half. $2.50 per day for doing the job and a $2.50 bonus for doing things the “American way.” A Socialization Organization would visit employees at home to ensure the workers followed Ford social guidelines like no gambling or drinking and learning English if the worker was an immigrant. Not only that, men could not receive the bonus if their wives worked outside the home and women were ineligible unless they were single and supporting a family. That’s as pointed as it comes to explaining how automotive workers transformed the way we work.
Automotive Workers Legacy
But the story doesn’t end there. In 1926, Ford Motor became one of the first companies to adopt a 40-hour work week. Between the high daily wages and mandatory weekend time off, the stated idea was for these workers to earn a livable wage, buy Ford products, and go enjoy them on Saturday and Sunday. As such, there’s no denying that Henry Ford and his company had an outsized impact on not only how cars are built but also how the automotive workers building those cars were responsible for many of the work-related norms we take for granted today.
Between Ford, General Motors, and Walter P. Chrysler’s eponymous company, Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers had an even bigger impact on the way Americans operate to this day. All that production might led to millions of Americans getting behind the wheel. So many in fact that President Dwight Eisenhower created the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, the catalyst behind the network of interstate highways that crisscross the nation. It allowed Americans a new level of freedom from behind the wheel of the automobile, and we’ve been on the open road ever since.
