The Five-Dollar Day

1914 · The Revolutionaries · Work 880 of 1,871

The executive offices of a large motor car works in Highland Park near Detroit on a Monday morning in early January, flat winter daylight through tall steel-framed windows and electric ceiling lamps, a man in a dark suit standing behind a plain oak desk speaking from a single sheet of paper held low, a tight half-circle of reporters in overcoats in front of him holding their hats in their hands and short pencils over small plain notepads, their breath faintly visible in the cold room, at the far window a slim man in a dark suit standing apart with his back to the room, turned toward the glass, his face hidden, beyond the window the long banded windows of four-storey concrete factory halls and the tall chimneys of a power house under a pale grey sky, a bare wooden floor, a coat stand.

Who
Henry Ford (1863–1947) turned the car into a mass product. Born on his family's farm near Dearborn, Michigan, he founded the Ford Motor Company on 16 June 1903. From October 1908 it built the Model T, some 15 million of them by 1927. Ford brought the moving assembly line into car making; it made cars cheap and the work monotonous. He was also an avowed antisemite. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, ran the series "The International Jew" from May 1920, drawing on the forged "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; in book form it appeared in more than a dozen languages. Hitler praised him as early as 1923, and in 1938 the Nazi regime awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. In 1927, after a libel suit, Ford had apologised publicly, but the writings kept circulating. He fought the unions with his own company police: on 26 May 1937 its men beat up organisers of the United Auto Workers in Dearborn. Ford did not recognise the union until May 1941.
The moment
On Monday 5 January 1914 reporters crowded into the executive offices of Ford's Highland Park plant near Detroit. It was not Henry Ford who spoke but James Couzens, the 41-year-old general manager. He read a prepared statement: from 12 January the working day would fall from nine hours to eight, and no man aged 22 or over would receive less than five dollars a day, "the greatest revolution in the matter of rewards for its workers ever known to the industrial world". Ford, 50, stood near a window. Behind the office building lay the halls where the moving assembly line had been running since the autumn of 1913. By 1914 it would cut the time to assemble a car from twelve and a half hours to 93 minutes, but it had already made the work so monotonous that men quit in droves: in 1913 Ford hired 50,448 men to keep an average of 13,623 at work.
The other side
The five dollars were not a simple pay rise. The old wage stayed, topped up by a profit share, but only for men over 22 with at least six months at the plant whose way of life the Sociological Department checked on home visits; drinking, gambling or taking in lodgers could cost them the bonus. Women and young single men were at first left out. The morning after the announcement some 10,000 men stood in the cold outside the plant; on 12 January job seekers were driven off with fire hoses. In 1922 Ford wrote that the five-dollar day had been "one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made".

What the sources leave open: It is documented that Couzens read the statement in the executive offices and that Ford stood near a window; which room it was and what it looked like is not recorded, and the office in the picture is typified. How many reporters came and what Ford wore is not described. Whether Ford or Couzens devised the plan is disputed.

Further reading

Sources