The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921

by Stephen Meyer and Stephen Meyer III

Book Overview

In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in a small Detroit workshop. Five years later, he introduced the Model T and met with extraordinary commercial success. Between 1910 and 1914, he developed mass production and made the conveyor a symbol of the auto-industrial age. Then, in 1914, Ford acquired an overnight reputation as humanitarian, philanthropist and social reformer; and simultaneously infuriated the business community and stunned...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0873955099
• ISBN13: 9780873955096
• Release Date: June 1981
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Wait til you read the part about the guy who gave Fords the finger!

This is a wonderful former dissertation that became a good book, especially important now as we witness the ruin of the US auto industry, with the full complicity of its inmates. Notably, the last people to jump the sinking ship will be the UAW leadership, not the Ford or GM bosses. The UAW bosses need to preserve their pensions, while the Big Auto bosses know they are not in business to make cars, but money. How US auto came to its zombie like state now is, of course, rooted in its past, and Meyer does a fine job getting us in at the start. From Taylor, who sought to strip the mind of the worker on the job and to replace that mind with the mind of the boss, to the Christian benevolent societies that sought to Improve the Foreigners by destroying their culture---and the carrots and sticks that made that possible---all of that is here in the text. And the finger story is worth the price of admission alone.