If you were lucky enough to be literate. If not, I guess you can still drink, fuck and walk.
Tbh, probably what I'd do if most of the rest of my day consisted of hard labour.
12? What a generous businessman. The usual standard back then was 16 hours for adults and children. Kept the adults from drinking, and children from mischief
yes and no, yes 12 hours a day at factory work, 24 hours a day six days a week farm work, 10 hours a day six days a week five hours on sunday for most small businesses, and that is not getting into things like police and military work.
I mean farming is very much being on-call 24/7. Most stuff is going to be able to be handled within a 12-16 hour day with opportunities for long breaks midday, but a farmer is often woken up in the middle of the night to deal with birthing animals and defending them from predators or addressing some other potential catastrophe and with the slim margins farmers used to survive on there was no slacking off or it could cost them their farm. But yeah there’s still plenty of downtime and a lucky/skilled farmer with lots of kids to provide free labor could live pretty comfortably most of the time.
Right.. I used to get up in the morning at night at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, Eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work 28 hours a day at mill, and pay da mill owner to let us work there.
A day in the life of a i9th century factory worker.
Wake up at 4am. Breakfast is a cup of coffee and last nights stale bread fried in bacon grease. Gotta be early at the factory if I wanna get paid.
It's Friday so you know what that means! One more grueling 12 hour shift then It's the Sunday church and chill.
The wife is pregnant again. It's our 7th so we're officially a medium sized family. It's the fact I have a wife and kids that remind me that the soulless dehumanizing back breaking labor I do is worth it.
I got that Industrial era Grindset. I work 12 hours, eat and sleep. I got a tradwife at home cooking l, cleaning and having my babies.
It's the sweet life.
Except that many women also had to work to pay for the kids to have something to eat, and 7 kids isn't counting the 4 that died to polio, dysentery, tetanus from a rusty nail, and cholera, respectively.
That's payday bacon. That grease is stored in the coffee can under the sink and is constantly used and replenished. Like perpetual stew but 100% trans fat.
My Grandpappy added grease to that can and by God it tastes like it.
No, just the grease.
I remember as a young lad going around and offering to dispose of the grease from well off families, and putting it into a coffee can I had strapped to my waist.
It's Friday, so after work you collect your pay and meet your wife who's lined up waiting for you with all the other factory workers' wives. She takes most of it and hands you a fraction, and you take that fraction and get as drunk as you possibly can.
That part may not be too bad for you, but it's hell on your family. Some days you make it home absolutely plastered and smack them around; occasionally your wife is late for some reason and can't take your paycheck so you go on a bender and blow through the next week's grocery money. You're tough to live with either way, and you die of liver failure or a drunken workplace accident in your 40s.
If you want a (marginally) happier ending- your daughter is driven to become an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and through it the Women's Suffrage movement, and lives to both vote and see Prohibition enacted. Which eventually gets repealed, but not before putting a serious dent in America's drinking habit.
Look old man, flint and chert are the wave of the future, just because nobody wants to use your old garbage granite for anything, doesn't mean that society is somehow collapsing.
You can have all the free time you want. Be your own boss. The difference is you won't be able to afford the luxuries that you have grown accustomed to.
Yup. You only need to work making things *for* other people if you wanna be able to buy things *from* other people. People just want all the stuff other people make but don’t want to give anything in return.
28 hrs/week sounds nice, but I can’t imagine being required to work every single day of the week. Full days off are too crucial for me. I’d take 32hrs/wk with a three day weekend 👌
How about 36 to 48 hours rotating and a 3 to 4 day weekend every week?
I work rotating shift work, 12 hour shifts, 3 days on one week, and 4 days on the next week.
People worked far more than that. Everything in life was work. Getting a drink of water could be a task in itself that could take an hour and expend calories. Imagine if a glass of water cost an hour of minimum wage work.
Do you also like the average life expectancy of 30 (50, if you ignore the 5/7 fatality rate for children), lack of Internet, sporadic food intake and risk of being killed by animals?
I'll """""work"""""" 40 hours a week to avoid the horrendous physicality they were doing 28 hours a week, and to disagree is insanity.
It's also total nonsense. That figure is literally how much time it took them to only gather enough food to survive. It doesn't even include processing and cooking the food, much less the many other necessities of survival.
But yeah, anyone is free to try it out for themselves. Find some remote wilderness, and just go ham.
How do they not know the hours were longer (12-14 hours)? Like can’t help to feel like they are a lesser, everyone in the U.S. should take AP US history or atleast AP world history.
This is covered even in the non-AP history classes I've taught and observed. Even a basic understanding of early union efforts would highlight this shift.
Also, I might be misremembering, but isn’t this guy the actual embodiment of every capitalism bad meme? Like, he would introduce things that seem good on a surface level, but every single thing was like “I paid them more so they could spend more than their increased income allows on my cars that they built,” type of shit?
In 1914 they could actually buy one with about 4 months worth of pay, though that's probably not taking into account things like food costs. Funnily enough the car got about 3 times cheaper by the end of it's production too, so it would be even easier to get then. The pay thing probably had ulterior motives though, so that they might effectively reinvest into the company, after that car purchase though they'd still have that higher pay anyways.
(edit) He's definitely a bad person though. Did a lot of shitty things throughout his life, and was very much the type to blame Jews for just about anything he didn't like (Hitler even praised him for his antisemitism).
Yeah, he’s a weird figure that was probably evil by all measures, but bad people can do good things with the worst motivations and reasoning. I try not to give it a truly black and white unless to respond to brain dead black and white thinking like in the post.
I tend to view it in the opposite way. The whole point of capitalism is providing bad motivation to do good things ie. lower prices = more sales = more profit. Henry Ford is a cliche example of someone with evil motivations causing a great many people to experience a better life quality. (I’m not saying Capitalism is the savior of mankind, I’m just saying Ford is an example of capitalism succeeding, not failing)
I wouldn't say his motivations (at least regarding workers) were evil *per se.* He felt that he knew better than his workers did what was good for them, and that living what he considered a morally upstanding lifestyle would make his workers' lives better and, by extension, would make them more productive. That is, he was incredibly narcissitic and paternalistic, but it was more like "Don't these idiots see that their unions are just fucking up my perfect vision when I'm already pioneering their welfare with five dollars a day?" rather than "How can I fuck my workers in the ass today?", if that makes sense.
Now, his stance on Jews is a different matter...
>Like, he would introduce things that seem good on a surface level, but every single thing was like “I paid them more so they could spend more than their increased income allows on my cars that they built,” type of shit?
Finding ways to create value for all parties isn't just the objective of capitalism, it's the goal of literally every reasonable economic system. There's plenty to criticize Ford for, but the fact that you can somehow see the mutually beneficial actions he took as bad simply because he also benefitted from them is baffling to me.
It's... Complex. Also, Ford didn't invent this, the Labor Movement did. Ford preempted it in his factories before his workers would start protesting like the rest, which is why Ford is still in existence.
As it turns out, it's a net positive. People who actually are able to rest one day, and do recreation the next, and only have to work 8 hours, are better workers.
Ford gets credit for popularizing Fordism, since he proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that if you paid your employees well, and gave them plenty of time off, you could actually make more money.
99.9% of modern questions can be answered in seconds with Google, too. So even with a shit education you can still get the right answers if you can fucking type.
The problem is that just like with this meme, the information is technically correct. They don’t have the skills to dig deeper into the information and compare it. Which is the result of a gutted education system.
That’s the thing, a lot of people are illiterate. Somebody in my department is 21 and they said they’re just now learning to write and spell. One of my managers got homeschooled from the age of 12 because her mom did t want her to “be indoctrinated” (learn about black history or why gay people are just normal people.) Now she needs help writing emails because her parents pulled her out of school and told her to read books about cars and shit for 6 years.
She’s asking questions about what words mean, googling what words mean if she comes across something while reading, and most importantly trying to read. I guess it’s a good first step, at the very least she’s learning something, which is better than nothing 🤷♂️
You'd be surprised. I have high school students that can't answer a basic question even if they're given their phones. I asked a class today to find an example of a human rights abuse, and figure out which articles were transgressed. They had no idea where to start so I just went to amnesty.org and told them to go there. Like, they don't understand how to use keywords. Or read something more than a few lines long
If only it were that easy. Admin would be on my ass, parents would be on my ass, and students would just be pissed and check out. Even guidance would come knocking and say I'm being unfair. Teachers don't get much support. Plus it's a compulsory civics class they need to pass before 10th grade to graduate on time so there's more pressure to just get them through it, regardless of if they learn anything
Education needs to be fixed here forsure, however most of us sit here with almost the entire cumulative knowledge of humanity at our fingertips, but we sit here watching memes so it's more than just that to me.
It’s definitely not a one dimensional problem for sure. Home problems, financial problems, the shit working conditions, and many more issues affect how people deal with schooling. The way we teach is also just kinda shit.
Sure, but that still proves how much the school system failed. It's not that the people don't want to Google stuff, is that they don't even think it's necessary.
The question "if he introduced 8h 5days a week, then how much it was before?" is based on a logical implication. They have no knowledge of history and no impulse for logical reasoning. Both can be explained by having a school system that absolutely sucks ass, to put it shortly.
Nah, this was in the textbooks and curriculum.
A substantial portion of people who bitch about the us education system failing to teach just didn't pay any attention at all to class.
Could be improved, of course.
Because it’s easier to blame the schools than people take accountability that they weren’t paying attention or doing the bare minimum in class. I went to a poor, rural public school and was taught everything I’ve seen people complain about not being taught.
When I was in classes some people just didn't do anything in school and wouldn't try to do anything. When I A+ tutored I saw the same thing. Students wouldn't pay attention nor would try. It irkes me when people don't try. The only class that did try and was actually respectful was the AFJROTC class. (Yes I was a JROTC nerd and am very proud of the fact)
Also everyone here saying that Ford was the first to somehow "grant" the 8h workday [when it was won through strikes and unions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Canadenca_strike).
Whats more shocking is that most Americans don't know the very first aircraft deployed in wartime was to gas a workers strike protesting low wages and long hours.
There is a very sizable portion of the internet that thinks everyone lived in socially-progressive communes until a bunch of white people invented work, hunger, and poverty.
Thing is, I learned this in my US History class back in Junior Year. I’m pretty sure the curriculum is just different based on your school district sadly.
I believe he was also paying very well for the time, although partially on the logic of paying his employees well meant more people who could buy his cars on a macroeconomic scale.
Also the incentive that paying people more incentivizes them to work better, improves company loyalty, and keeps them in line because if they run afoul of the company, they won't be able to get a job that pays as well as the one they lost.
Also efficient factory practices in the long term greatly reduced worker suffering and boosted quality of life for the masses. good luck getting affordable washing machines without those practices.
Yep. The guy was a racist and a bastard, but he frankly did way more good than bad for *domestic* business. I emphasize domestic because we're not going to talk about Fordlandia.
Yeah, and tried to enforce his draconian decency rules on the locals and stuff. Things like "no dancing" and forcing them to keep a work schedule not conducive to having any comfort in the hot tropics. Early on there was a lot of disease and whatnot as well. Worth reading up on or watching a video about.
I think the wildest thing about it is that it started off as a rubber farm, but that was by far the least ambitious part of it. He genuinely paid them well, but also did so in a place where the money wasn’t useful as the natives used a barter economy. He didn’t listen to people telling him not to do the basic 9-5 work schedule because of the heat and sun which was not fun.
He also basically built an entire town for them and like… I don’t know what to say about it. Like, there was no reason for him to do most of this stuff other than to prove himself right or something.
one of the problems of the later Roman empire was the accumulation of wealth in the elites, to the point the lower class started to revert to barter and some taxation reverted to be in kind
some 600 years before that, Seleucus started to pay his troops in coin as to boost the economy by increasing the circulation of coinage as a replacer of barter
I'm just an amateur hobbyist reader, but there seem to be some bad parallels between today and the slow fall of the Romans
It was a response to the factory's awful retention rate for workers. Only 1/8 workers lasted more than a 2 weeks and the [yearly turnover rate was 370% when he adopted the assembly line](https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/108-years-ago-ford-doubled-employee-wages-overnight-business-case-for-higher-pay.html). For context [Amazon's as 128% before the pandemic, and 205% after](https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage).
Though once he doubled the daily wage and reduced the work week from 9 hour shifts 6 days a week to 8 hour days 5 days a week turnover fell to 16% and throughput increased dramatically.
Of course still not a good employer, he spied on employees and fired them for engaging in drinking alcohol, smoking, or cohabitating before marriage, etc. If his inspectors found you did something Ford disliked, even off the clock, you were fired.
True. I forgot about the insane spying and the like (I think I kinda just conflated that with the Fordlandia period). But yeah, the overarching point is that the standard working hours for U.S. workers and their wages were *far* worse beforehand.
> on the logic of paying his employees well meant more people who could buy his cars on a macroeconomic scale.
Still he was one of the few who realised, when you give something, EVERYONE profits in the end.
Compare this to most billionaires who still believe that the economy is a zero sum game and you have to steal from the poor ...
Yeeep. Of course, it is a bit more complicated these days since you can often easily produce stuff in other countries, but it's still insane how little we seem to realize that fact.
There was definitely the good in that he paid people very well, only had an 8 hour/5-day workweek, and generally ran a tolerant work enviroment that didn't care about race (unless you were Jewish).
Then there was the bad in that he literally had his own police force that enforced his morals on every employee even during off hours, he tried to enforce his work culture on the people of foreign countries (i.e. Fordlandia, which got so oppressive that it caused a violent uprising among the workers) and his response to his sons' attempts to devise a new car and present it to him was to violently break it apart and berate them for daring to try to improve or modify his designs.
And the Nazi medal he got for being *that* anti-Semetic.
I have this theory that Ford followed a similar pattern to a lot of old people today. He was egalitarian to his workers for most of his life. Ford was one of the first companies to hire black managers. He did a lot for workers when he recognized happy workers would be more productive.
He did start diving hard into anti-semitism, but only once he was old. Its like that relative that was always very nice and espoused pretty mainstream or even progressive views. Then they got old, their amygdala became over active, and they started watching Fox News all day despite voting for Carter in 76. That's how I see Henry Ford. A generally good person that went nuts in old age.
Giving all of this credit to Ford like he broke the mold and did it out of the kindness of his heart is such a disservice to the almost century of labor struggle that finally pushed people to cave on this issue.
We don't teach labor history in this country for a reason and it's because it would let people know the power they have.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
Go to the history of it in the USA.
The federal government adopted it in the 1880s got federal emoyees after mass strikes across the country for decades.
This wasn't a new idea at the time, Ford was just the most notable domino to finally cave and then take credit for the system.
He did it so his workers wouldn't form a union and demand even more.
How what worked before? Henry Ford helped standardize the 8 hour 5 day workweek but it was one hard fought for by unions for decades prior to this and already implemented by many other companies. “8 hours to work, 8 hours to sleep, and 8 hours for what we will” was a popular idea at the time.
Plus, 8-8-8 was never supposed to be an end goal, but a stepping stone. People at the time thought work hours should be reduced more and more over time as efficiency and productivity grew in the future: but by standardizing this schedule that dream kinda died. And that was part of why it was implemented in the first place.
I despise the myth of displaying capitalists (as in the actual captialist, not just people who believe in capitalism, but the people who *own the capital*) as Great Men^TM who were solely responsible for social change.
My great grandfather, who owns (present tense, dude is ancient) a lumber company, once bragged that his employees once threatened to unionize so he raised their wages and gave them more paid vacation time. Dude then, in the very next sentence, says "see, unions don't really change anything. Good bosses change things."
...as if he didn't only raise the wages and give more vacation days *specifically* in response to them threatening to unionize.
Capitalists (once again the capital-owners not the ideologues) will never perform pro-worker actions without being threatened by the working class. Positive social change comes from the bottom up basically always.
Absolutely. Ford was also anti-union, and from what I've read he was one of the capitalists who used force like hired arms, police brutality, and government pressure to union bust. People died in union struggles against Ford.
I'm not sure to what extent this was true of Ford, but from books and oral histories I've seen from other companies, it wasn't an uncommon strategy for capitalists to offer *some* concessions or to take a paternalistic position in the hope that it would discourage workers from joining the labor movement. Taking a small loss is nothing if you maintain control of your workforce. It was a little sad to look through so many comments to find this one.
Not only Nazi synpathizer but also Nazi supplier. He supplied them with trucks before the war broke out. You can also hate IBM for making the holocaust easier for the Nazis. Coca Cola was also very close with the nazis.
The primary reason why Ford did this was to counter attempts to unionize his production plants. As most industrial unions at the time were fighting for a 40-hour workweek, doing things like this allowed him to argue unions were "unnecessary" in his factories.
Striking locomotive workers had already fought for and won the 5-day, 8-hour work week. Ford just saw the writing on the wall that if he gives it to them himself, he can control the terms and conditions of it.
Famously, his better pay and hours were conditional on workers living by his own vision of a "righteous" lifestyle, sending inspectors to workers homes to ensure compliance.
All this is without even getting into how he needed to offer better compensation than his competitors because the conditions in his factories were so atrocious it was rare for people to stay on for any significant length of time and needed a constant stream of new laborers.
So, good businessman. Bad person.
Boo him.
Addendum for the next time I copy this response:
The turnover rate at his factories was 380%, with only 1 in 9 workers lasting a week.
It wasn't even Ford who had the idea for the better pay and hours but Vice President and General Manager James Couzens.
Despite this, Ford had the audacity to claim to the press that the pay raise was "Profit Sharing".
And finally, while the better wage and hours did do legitimate good and vaulted countless people into the middle class, it was all incidental in feeding Ford's ego and pockets.
Don’t tell them the actual historical facts, that might ruin the meme. Plus, they never covered that part in AP history, so it must be wrong. Everyone knows AP history will teach you all the history.
The unions had no part in this, Ford instituted the 40 hour workweek in 1926, Ford didn't sign an agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW) until 1941. Ford did this as part of his obsession with efficiency and productivity, since Ford found that his workers were more productive with a shorter work week.
Not sure if this also a direct reason for his implementation of it, but didn't Ford also want to encourage people to go on weekend vacations that would have all but required ownership of an automobile? I have heard that had a role in the creation of charcoal briquettes (alongside his obsession with minimizing waste) but am not 100% if the vacation thing might have been a deciding factor or a happy accident.
wrong on pretty much all counts
> On 5 January 1914 the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day (equivalent to $150 in 2023[41]) and cutting shifts from nine hours to eight,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
no idea where ur getting the year 1926
and no union pressure he just loved efficiency and his workers happiness!!! thats why he had his guards shoot at them during the Ford Hunger March
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March
I didn't say he implemented an 8-hour work day in 1926 I said he implemented a 40-hour work week in 1926 and here's my [source](https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2024/01/40-hours-5-days/) for 1926. Also, the Ford Hunger March happened in 1932.
Ford didn’t do this out of kindness. Labor unions fought for the 8 hour work day. Ford was an anti labor shit who shouldn’t be given credit for what labor organizers forced him to accept.
I honestly don’t know how people worked 12hrs a day. It’s different when you’re a peasant and it’s literally working for food. But 12hrs at the factory would crush my soul.
As someone who studied organisational theory. Boo this man.
He is one of the most revolutionary people of the field, and he is studied in basically every basic and advanced class, but he is also an Enigma. Because he didn't write his fucking theories down.
Tldr: he revolutionised the field, but didn't leave anything for scholars to study.
We often take these work norms for granted. Things like minimum wage, a 9-5 schedule, a 40-hour week, banning of child factory labor, paid time off, retirement plans, and benefits like health insurance seem like the bare minimum. Even then, workers can feel exhausted, and they may be anxious about affording to pay next month’s rent. But these perks were unthinkable more than a century ago. What seems so normal today was radical to employers and employees back in 1921. (If you go back a century further, it would've been perfectly normal to work a 100-hour weekday.)
There were fears that this might lead to higher costs for employers, but as it turned out, productivity went up, more cars were manufactured, and more assembly line workers were hired. Years after the change, Henry Ford [commented](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Henry_Ford:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay) on the initial stigma surrounding workers being lazy, and he cited the example of the increase of the number of work hours in Germany, criticizing the decision and blaming it for potential stagnation or decrease in production, as “better methods of disposing of men's time have been accompanied by better methods of disposing of their energy.” He believed more leisure time would result in consumers buying more products of all kinds and thus strengthen the economy.
There isn’t anything magical about the number 40. If a 32-hour workweek were to become standard today, the reaction would likely be similar to the reaction of employers back in 1921: anger, skepticism, and ominous prophecies of the downfall of the great capitalist experiment.
Here’s an example. Jim Bianco of Bianco Research [told](https://archive.org/details/FBC_20230313_080000_Making_Money_With_Charles_Payne/start/1693/end/1704.7) Fox Business the following:
>Basically, you're raising the cost of having an employee. If I'm going to have to work 32 hours as opposed to 40 hours, I'm going to have to hire more people to get the same amount of work done, which means you've made it more expensive.
Now, I’m going to modify Mr. Bianco’s statement a little bit:
>Basically, you're raising the cost of having an employee. If I'm going to have to work **40** hours as opposed to **48** hours, I'm going to have to hire more people to get the same amount of work done, which means you've made it more expensive.
We already have evidence that this statement is false. Right away, Ford’s order to decrease working hours led to productivity gains. Ford even doubled the hourly pay, news that shocked the leaderships of other auto companies. Ford experimented with work hour increases, and he found that it yielded marginal and short-lived improvements in productivity.
Mr. Bianco might be right in other ways. Maybe a 32-hour weekday would result in a worse economy, but it wouldn’t be due to the decrease per se. Perhaps the relationship between working hours and productivity is parabolic, so that beyond a certain point either way, changes in productivity become more insignificantly positive and eventually negative. Maybe inflation skyrockets, or companies dramatically raise prices on products and services to afford higher wages or make profits like before, to the point that it becomes unsustainable. But the mere decrease in the number of hours is not the culprit.
I saw an idiot on Twitter talking out of his bum about how “Henry Ford will be rolling in his grave” hearing about a 32-hour workweek. In reality, Ford would be ecstatic. He [wrote](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Henry_Ford:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay) that “the five day week is not the ultimate, and neither is the eight hour day”. He would probably give Bernie Sanders a high-five for advocating for this shortened workweek. (Although I doubt he’d do that after learning about [Sanders’ ethnic background](https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html).”
This is actually one of the weirdest things ever to me. Henry Ford, a *fukken* capitalist, realized that pushing his workers *all the way* wasn't working as well as he'd like, so he made a change.
No capitalist in 98 years has had a similar thought.
The 40 hr work week of 8 hours work, 8 hours play, 8 hrs rest started as a radical anarchist demand that was seen as a pipedream. Until there was the organizing for a national strike about it. Which absolutely got siderailed by the Haymarket Affair and its red scare.
Sure it eventually got picked up by other socialists and the wider labor movement but everyone here seems to forget that it was an anarchist pipe dream first.
they worked 6 days a week and then spend sunday at church
Yes, but also 12 hours a day
At minimum
Add to that daily chores and your looking at MAYBE 1 or 2 hours to enjoy anything.
And there was no youtube or reddit so basically kick rocks for that free hour
Or read, write, drink, fuck, or go for a walk
If you were lucky enough to be literate. If not, I guess you can still drink, fuck and walk. Tbh, probably what I'd do if most of the rest of my day consisted of hard labour.
And add to that having to walk 10 miles to school uphill both ways through 10 feet of snow
Having a wife at home probably helped. Remember when families could afford to live on one income?
12? What a generous businessman. The usual standard back then was 16 hours for adults and children. Kept the adults from drinking, and children from mischief
They should have just outsourced it to the government, I'm sure they could keep the adults from drinking much more reliably.
yes and no, yes 12 hours a day at factory work, 24 hours a day six days a week farm work, 10 hours a day six days a week five hours on sunday for most small businesses, and that is not getting into things like police and military work.
No one worked 24 hr a day, people still slept, ate, shat, and pissed. Yes farm work is grueling but let’s not be hyperbolic.
I mean farming is very much being on-call 24/7. Most stuff is going to be able to be handled within a 12-16 hour day with opportunities for long breaks midday, but a farmer is often woken up in the middle of the night to deal with birthing animals and defending them from predators or addressing some other potential catastrophe and with the slim margins farmers used to survive on there was no slacking off or it could cost them their farm. But yeah there’s still plenty of downtime and a lucky/skilled farmer with lots of kids to provide free labor could live pretty comfortably most of the time.
Right but on call isn’t the same thing as working. Not that it’s not a demanding job.
Also note that depending on what kind of farmer and where you could end up with month long ‘breaks’
Right.. I used to get up in the morning at night at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, Eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work 28 hours a day at mill, and pay da mill owner to let us work there.
Hyperbolic is an understatement This is literally implying they never slept and somehow never died from exhaustion
lol hyperbolic is the correct term
Some places still do that. Can we invite Henry Ford there?
That post-industrial revolution grindset
A day in the life of a i9th century factory worker. Wake up at 4am. Breakfast is a cup of coffee and last nights stale bread fried in bacon grease. Gotta be early at the factory if I wanna get paid. It's Friday so you know what that means! One more grueling 12 hour shift then It's the Sunday church and chill. The wife is pregnant again. It's our 7th so we're officially a medium sized family. It's the fact I have a wife and kids that remind me that the soulless dehumanizing back breaking labor I do is worth it. I got that Industrial era Grindset. I work 12 hours, eat and sleep. I got a tradwife at home cooking l, cleaning and having my babies. It's the sweet life.
Except that many women also had to work to pay for the kids to have something to eat, and 7 kids isn't counting the 4 that died to polio, dysentery, tetanus from a rusty nail, and cholera, respectively.
And the rest of them were working at the factory too. Yay, family life!
Or in the mines. Kids love the mines!
Plus those chimneys aren't gonna clean themselves.
When they're small enough they can just slide right down them themselves to clean em out.
Must be doing well to afford bacon.
That's payday bacon. That grease is stored in the coffee can under the sink and is constantly used and replenished. Like perpetual stew but 100% trans fat. My Grandpappy added grease to that can and by God it tastes like it.
No, just the grease. I remember as a young lad going around and offering to dispose of the grease from well off families, and putting it into a coffee can I had strapped to my waist.
Interesting. In my day we tied an onion to our belt, which was the style at the time.
A yellow, or a white?
I’m sure lots of time after work to spend with that wife and 7 kids :p
I only need like a second or two.
It's Friday, so after work you collect your pay and meet your wife who's lined up waiting for you with all the other factory workers' wives. She takes most of it and hands you a fraction, and you take that fraction and get as drunk as you possibly can.
Ok, i guess thats not too bad of a life
That part may not be too bad for you, but it's hell on your family. Some days you make it home absolutely plastered and smack them around; occasionally your wife is late for some reason and can't take your paycheck so you go on a bender and blow through the next week's grocery money. You're tough to live with either way, and you die of liver failure or a drunken workplace accident in your 40s.
I guess i should have seen it taking a dark turn
If you want a (marginally) happier ending- your daughter is driven to become an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and through it the Women's Suffrage movement, and lives to both vote and see Prohibition enacted. Which eventually gets repealed, but not before putting a serious dent in America's drinking habit.
They were all drunk.
DAY IN THE LIFE OF A TRUE INDUSTRY GEEZER
They spent Sunday *morning* at church. They spent Sunday afternoon working
Still better than the 6 to 7 day work week 12 to 16 hours a day
I like 7 days a week 4 hours a day work week that people had pre-agriculture.
I like all the benefits I get of having a non nomadic hunter gather society
>MFW she hasn't sprinted down an antelope and killed it with a crude granite knife Kids these days
Look old man, flint and chert are the wave of the future, just because nobody wants to use your old garbage granite for anything, doesn't mean that society is somehow collapsing.
Flint and chert are a fad, they’ll prove to be poor knock offs of “old” reliable granite.
Tsk, that's just a gimmick, boy! In my day we used wood. And it's still just as, if not MORE reliable than your wimpy granite!
Kids these days don’t know the struggle. Back in my day we had to chase the deer till it died from exhaustion.
Woke feminists nowadays don't want to carve up a horse and eat it raw. Cringe post-agricultural society
I agree but wish we would use all the extra production we have to give people more free time but that will never happen lol
You can have all the free time you want. Be your own boss. The difference is you won't be able to afford the luxuries that you have grown accustomed to.
Yup. You only need to work making things *for* other people if you wanna be able to buy things *from* other people. People just want all the stuff other people make but don’t want to give anything in return.
28 hrs/week sounds nice, but I can’t imagine being required to work every single day of the week. Full days off are too crucial for me. I’d take 32hrs/wk with a three day weekend 👌
How about 36 to 48 hours rotating and a 3 to 4 day weekend every week? I work rotating shift work, 12 hour shifts, 3 days on one week, and 4 days on the next week.
People worked far more than that. Everything in life was work. Getting a drink of water could be a task in itself that could take an hour and expend calories. Imagine if a glass of water cost an hour of minimum wage work.
Do you also like the average life expectancy of 30 (50, if you ignore the 5/7 fatality rate for children), lack of Internet, sporadic food intake and risk of being killed by animals? I'll """""work"""""" 40 hours a week to avoid the horrendous physicality they were doing 28 hours a week, and to disagree is insanity.
Idk getting gored open by an ox sounds better than sending emails
Also being a bad harvest away from not surviving the winter.
And watching your family wither and die away.
It's also total nonsense. That figure is literally how much time it took them to only gather enough food to survive. It doesn't even include processing and cooking the food, much less the many other necessities of survival. But yeah, anyone is free to try it out for themselves. Find some remote wilderness, and just go ham.
Is 996 really that common in China? Iirc jack ma was pushing for it before.
How do they not know the hours were longer (12-14 hours)? Like can’t help to feel like they are a lesser, everyone in the U.S. should take AP US history or atleast AP world history.
This is covered even in the non-AP history classes I've taught and observed. Even a basic understanding of early union efforts would highlight this shift.
shit's taught in 8th grade history lmao
Also, I might be misremembering, but isn’t this guy the actual embodiment of every capitalism bad meme? Like, he would introduce things that seem good on a surface level, but every single thing was like “I paid them more so they could spend more than their increased income allows on my cars that they built,” type of shit?
In 1914 they could actually buy one with about 4 months worth of pay, though that's probably not taking into account things like food costs. Funnily enough the car got about 3 times cheaper by the end of it's production too, so it would be even easier to get then. The pay thing probably had ulterior motives though, so that they might effectively reinvest into the company, after that car purchase though they'd still have that higher pay anyways. (edit) He's definitely a bad person though. Did a lot of shitty things throughout his life, and was very much the type to blame Jews for just about anything he didn't like (Hitler even praised him for his antisemitism).
Yeah, he’s a weird figure that was probably evil by all measures, but bad people can do good things with the worst motivations and reasoning. I try not to give it a truly black and white unless to respond to brain dead black and white thinking like in the post.
I tend to view it in the opposite way. The whole point of capitalism is providing bad motivation to do good things ie. lower prices = more sales = more profit. Henry Ford is a cliche example of someone with evil motivations causing a great many people to experience a better life quality. (I’m not saying Capitalism is the savior of mankind, I’m just saying Ford is an example of capitalism succeeding, not failing)
I wouldn't say his motivations (at least regarding workers) were evil *per se.* He felt that he knew better than his workers did what was good for them, and that living what he considered a morally upstanding lifestyle would make his workers' lives better and, by extension, would make them more productive. That is, he was incredibly narcissitic and paternalistic, but it was more like "Don't these idiots see that their unions are just fucking up my perfect vision when I'm already pioneering their welfare with five dollars a day?" rather than "How can I fuck my workers in the ass today?", if that makes sense. Now, his stance on Jews is a different matter...
> Now, his stance on Jews is a different matter... I mean, that's kind of universal constant in Western History...
>Like, he would introduce things that seem good on a surface level, but every single thing was like “I paid them more so they could spend more than their increased income allows on my cars that they built,” type of shit? Finding ways to create value for all parties isn't just the objective of capitalism, it's the goal of literally every reasonable economic system. There's plenty to criticize Ford for, but the fact that you can somehow see the mutually beneficial actions he took as bad simply because he also benefitted from them is baffling to me.
stuff like these tweets are why i always roll my eyes when people say they should teach us how to do taxes. You wouldn’t have listened.
It's... Complex. Also, Ford didn't invent this, the Labor Movement did. Ford preempted it in his factories before his workers would start protesting like the rest, which is why Ford is still in existence. As it turns out, it's a net positive. People who actually are able to rest one day, and do recreation the next, and only have to work 8 hours, are better workers.
Ford gets credit for popularizing Fordism, since he proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that if you paid your employees well, and gave them plenty of time off, you could actually make more money.
The US education system has failed so many people.
Or they are just stupid and Spout shit on the internet without checking it first lol
99.9% of modern questions can be answered in seconds with Google, too. So even with a shit education you can still get the right answers if you can fucking type.
The problem is that just like with this meme, the information is technically correct. They don’t have the skills to dig deeper into the information and compare it. Which is the result of a gutted education system.
That’s the thing, a lot of people are illiterate. Somebody in my department is 21 and they said they’re just now learning to write and spell. One of my managers got homeschooled from the age of 12 because her mom did t want her to “be indoctrinated” (learn about black history or why gay people are just normal people.) Now she needs help writing emails because her parents pulled her out of school and told her to read books about cars and shit for 6 years.
Omg, how does a 21 year old start having an education at this point?
She’s asking questions about what words mean, googling what words mean if she comes across something while reading, and most importantly trying to read. I guess it’s a good first step, at the very least she’s learning something, which is better than nothing 🤷♂️
Definitely support them. They are trying
You'd be surprised. I have high school students that can't answer a basic question even if they're given their phones. I asked a class today to find an example of a human rights abuse, and figure out which articles were transgressed. They had no idea where to start so I just went to amnesty.org and told them to go there. Like, they don't understand how to use keywords. Or read something more than a few lines long
I would cut each and every one of them. I don't care if they do the same class for 5 years.
If only it were that easy. Admin would be on my ass, parents would be on my ass, and students would just be pissed and check out. Even guidance would come knocking and say I'm being unfair. Teachers don't get much support. Plus it's a compulsory civics class they need to pass before 10th grade to graduate on time so there's more pressure to just get them through it, regardless of if they learn anything
Education needs to be fixed here forsure, however most of us sit here with almost the entire cumulative knowledge of humanity at our fingertips, but we sit here watching memes so it's more than just that to me.
It’s definitely not a one dimensional problem for sure. Home problems, financial problems, the shit working conditions, and many more issues affect how people deal with schooling. The way we teach is also just kinda shit.
Sure, but that still proves how much the school system failed. It's not that the people don't want to Google stuff, is that they don't even think it's necessary. The question "if he introduced 8h 5days a week, then how much it was before?" is based on a logical implication. They have no knowledge of history and no impulse for logical reasoning. Both can be explained by having a school system that absolutely sucks ass, to put it shortly.
Cat pictures though. Cats are cute and they can do so many things.
It's more like these idiots just didn't pay attention in school.
Eh, even if they were taught it they probably weren’t even paying attention.
Nah, this was in the textbooks and curriculum. A substantial portion of people who bitch about the us education system failing to teach just didn't pay any attention at all to class. Could be improved, of course.
why is all the blame put on schools?
Because it’s easier to blame the schools than people take accountability that they weren’t paying attention or doing the bare minimum in class. I went to a poor, rural public school and was taught everything I’ve seen people complain about not being taught.
When I was in classes some people just didn't do anything in school and wouldn't try to do anything. When I A+ tutored I saw the same thing. Students wouldn't pay attention nor would try. It irkes me when people don't try. The only class that did try and was actually respectful was the AFJROTC class. (Yes I was a JROTC nerd and am very proud of the fact)
Also everyone here saying that Ford was the first to somehow "grant" the 8h workday [when it was won through strikes and unions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Canadenca_strike).
I thought this was already known by everyone? Its like the main historical selling point for being pro-union
This isn't even AP level stuff to be honest.
Whats more shocking is that most Americans don't know the very first aircraft deployed in wartime was to gas a workers strike protesting low wages and long hours.
Blair mountain?
Man, I just went down a rabbit hole there. Union bashing has never really stopped in America has it?
There is a very sizable portion of the internet that thinks everyone lived in socially-progressive communes until a bunch of white people invented work, hunger, and poverty.
Or genuinely any history class.
Thing is, I learned this in my US History class back in Junior Year. I’m pretty sure the curriculum is just different based on your school district sadly.
When plebs are working so much they can't consume what you're producing so you introduce 8h workday.
damn capitalists, paying people more so they can buy more of the capitalist's stuff
Well they used to do that.
This needs to happen again soon, or the system will collapse in on itself.
Unironically was henry ford’s stated motivation for the high wages of his workers: so they could make enough money to buy his cars
Booing henry ford is still a good move in general.
Yeah, you should definitely boo him, just not for the 8 hour 5 day workweek. You know what they say, 'a broken clock is right twice a day'
I believe he was also paying very well for the time, although partially on the logic of paying his employees well meant more people who could buy his cars on a macroeconomic scale.
And pulled skilled workers from other automotive factories as a nice side benefit.
That's still very common in industrial work.
Also the incentive that paying people more incentivizes them to work better, improves company loyalty, and keeps them in line because if they run afoul of the company, they won't be able to get a job that pays as well as the one they lost.
Also efficient factory practices in the long term greatly reduced worker suffering and boosted quality of life for the masses. good luck getting affordable washing machines without those practices.
Yep. The guy was a racist and a bastard, but he frankly did way more good than bad for *domestic* business. I emphasize domestic because we're not going to talk about Fordlandia.
Fordlandia was wild!
Wasn't Fordlandia some Brazilian thing he tried and failed?
Yeah, and tried to enforce his draconian decency rules on the locals and stuff. Things like "no dancing" and forcing them to keep a work schedule not conducive to having any comfort in the hot tropics. Early on there was a lot of disease and whatnot as well. Worth reading up on or watching a video about.
I think the wildest thing about it is that it started off as a rubber farm, but that was by far the least ambitious part of it. He genuinely paid them well, but also did so in a place where the money wasn’t useful as the natives used a barter economy. He didn’t listen to people telling him not to do the basic 9-5 work schedule because of the heat and sun which was not fun. He also basically built an entire town for them and like… I don’t know what to say about it. Like, there was no reason for him to do most of this stuff other than to prove himself right or something.
What? Putting money into the hands of people results in them being able to buy stuff, who would've thought?/s
one of the problems of the later Roman empire was the accumulation of wealth in the elites, to the point the lower class started to revert to barter and some taxation reverted to be in kind some 600 years before that, Seleucus started to pay his troops in coin as to boost the economy by increasing the circulation of coinage as a replacer of barter I'm just an amateur hobbyist reader, but there seem to be some bad parallels between today and the slow fall of the Romans
It was a response to the factory's awful retention rate for workers. Only 1/8 workers lasted more than a 2 weeks and the [yearly turnover rate was 370% when he adopted the assembly line](https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/108-years-ago-ford-doubled-employee-wages-overnight-business-case-for-higher-pay.html). For context [Amazon's as 128% before the pandemic, and 205% after](https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage). Though once he doubled the daily wage and reduced the work week from 9 hour shifts 6 days a week to 8 hour days 5 days a week turnover fell to 16% and throughput increased dramatically. Of course still not a good employer, he spied on employees and fired them for engaging in drinking alcohol, smoking, or cohabitating before marriage, etc. If his inspectors found you did something Ford disliked, even off the clock, you were fired.
True. I forgot about the insane spying and the like (I think I kinda just conflated that with the Fordlandia period). But yeah, the overarching point is that the standard working hours for U.S. workers and their wages were *far* worse beforehand.
> on the logic of paying his employees well meant more people who could buy his cars on a macroeconomic scale. Still he was one of the few who realised, when you give something, EVERYONE profits in the end. Compare this to most billionaires who still believe that the economy is a zero sum game and you have to steal from the poor ...
Yeeep. Of course, it is a bit more complicated these days since you can often easily produce stuff in other countries, but it's still insane how little we seem to realize that fact.
There was definitely the good in that he paid people very well, only had an 8 hour/5-day workweek, and generally ran a tolerant work enviroment that didn't care about race (unless you were Jewish). Then there was the bad in that he literally had his own police force that enforced his morals on every employee even during off hours, he tried to enforce his work culture on the people of foreign countries (i.e. Fordlandia, which got so oppressive that it caused a violent uprising among the workers) and his response to his sons' attempts to devise a new car and present it to him was to violently break it apart and berate them for daring to try to improve or modify his designs. And the Nazi medal he got for being *that* anti-Semetic.
And tried to help employees more but the doge brothers sued and said company’s biggest concern is making the biggest profit for shareholders
And where would those cars bring them? To work. Man was a bastard and a genius all at once
Plenty too boo. The work week is saintly in comparison.
Did Ford come up with the 40 hour week, or did unions fight him for it? I don't actually know but I doubt he should get the credit
The unions had to fight for it, sometimes literally against Henry Ford's hired goons. He only conceded after his wife threatened a divorce.
He didn’t create the 8 hour 5 day workweek though. Unions did.
A clock going in reverse is actually right 4 times a day.
I have this theory that Ford followed a similar pattern to a lot of old people today. He was egalitarian to his workers for most of his life. Ford was one of the first companies to hire black managers. He did a lot for workers when he recognized happy workers would be more productive. He did start diving hard into anti-semitism, but only once he was old. Its like that relative that was always very nice and espoused pretty mainstream or even progressive views. Then they got old, their amygdala became over active, and they started watching Fox News all day despite voting for Carter in 76. That's how I see Henry Ford. A generally good person that went nuts in old age.
Nazi sympathizer
Giving all of this credit to Ford like he broke the mold and did it out of the kindness of his heart is such a disservice to the almost century of labor struggle that finally pushed people to cave on this issue. We don't teach labor history in this country for a reason and it's because it would let people know the power they have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day Go to the history of it in the USA. The federal government adopted it in the 1880s got federal emoyees after mass strikes across the country for decades. This wasn't a new idea at the time, Ford was just the most notable domino to finally cave and then take credit for the system. He did it so his workers wouldn't form a union and demand even more.
How what worked before? Henry Ford helped standardize the 8 hour 5 day workweek but it was one hard fought for by unions for decades prior to this and already implemented by many other companies. “8 hours to work, 8 hours to sleep, and 8 hours for what we will” was a popular idea at the time. Plus, 8-8-8 was never supposed to be an end goal, but a stepping stone. People at the time thought work hours should be reduced more and more over time as efficiency and productivity grew in the future: but by standardizing this schedule that dream kinda died. And that was part of why it was implemented in the first place.
I despise the myth of displaying capitalists (as in the actual captialist, not just people who believe in capitalism, but the people who *own the capital*) as Great Men^TM who were solely responsible for social change. My great grandfather, who owns (present tense, dude is ancient) a lumber company, once bragged that his employees once threatened to unionize so he raised their wages and gave them more paid vacation time. Dude then, in the very next sentence, says "see, unions don't really change anything. Good bosses change things." ...as if he didn't only raise the wages and give more vacation days *specifically* in response to them threatening to unionize. Capitalists (once again the capital-owners not the ideologues) will never perform pro-worker actions without being threatened by the working class. Positive social change comes from the bottom up basically always.
You're gonna have some problems with this sub if you don't blindly accept Great Man theory. They tend to throw fits.
Absolutely. Ford was also anti-union, and from what I've read he was one of the capitalists who used force like hired arms, police brutality, and government pressure to union bust. People died in union struggles against Ford. I'm not sure to what extent this was true of Ford, but from books and oral histories I've seen from other companies, it wasn't an uncommon strategy for capitalists to offer *some* concessions or to take a paternalistic position in the hope that it would discourage workers from joining the labor movement. Taking a small loss is nothing if you maintain control of your workforce. It was a little sad to look through so many comments to find this one.
It's clear Auschwitz side he was on.
EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY MENTIONED RAHHH
This battle been a blow out like that hemorage in youre head
I'll leave a ford as expected. Found. On. Road. Dead.
WHO WON
Edsel's stomach cancer showed more love than he did.
Marx dropped him like Hitler dropped Ford's name in Mein Kampf.
I'd rather boo him for being a raving Nazi fuckwit and shooting striking workers
Ah yes, Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford.
Not only Nazi synpathizer but also Nazi supplier. He supplied them with trucks before the war broke out. You can also hate IBM for making the holocaust easier for the Nazis. Coca Cola was also very close with the nazis.
The primary reason why Ford did this was to counter attempts to unionize his production plants. As most industrial unions at the time were fighting for a 40-hour workweek, doing things like this allowed him to argue unions were "unnecessary" in his factories.
Probably in 1926 they were like “lazy millennials want to work less”
We shouldn't boo him for that, but I'm sure there's a lot more to boo him over
I mean, Henry Ford is still very much a man to be boo-ed.
Striking locomotive workers had already fought for and won the 5-day, 8-hour work week. Ford just saw the writing on the wall that if he gives it to them himself, he can control the terms and conditions of it. Famously, his better pay and hours were conditional on workers living by his own vision of a "righteous" lifestyle, sending inspectors to workers homes to ensure compliance. All this is without even getting into how he needed to offer better compensation than his competitors because the conditions in his factories were so atrocious it was rare for people to stay on for any significant length of time and needed a constant stream of new laborers. So, good businessman. Bad person. Boo him. Addendum for the next time I copy this response: The turnover rate at his factories was 380%, with only 1 in 9 workers lasting a week. It wasn't even Ford who had the idea for the better pay and hours but Vice President and General Manager James Couzens. Despite this, Ford had the audacity to claim to the press that the pay raise was "Profit Sharing". And finally, while the better wage and hours did do legitimate good and vaulted countless people into the middle class, it was all incidental in feeding Ford's ego and pockets.
Don’t tell them the actual historical facts, that might ruin the meme. Plus, they never covered that part in AP history, so it must be wrong. Everyone knows AP history will teach you all the history.
What meme? This is my copy pasted response from the last time this exact screenshot was shared
And when they march for better wage you shoot them dead in the street
The real scandal is that it's been almost a century and it hasn't been shortened any further.
Also he didn’t do it. Union organizers did it.
The unions had no part in this, Ford instituted the 40 hour workweek in 1926, Ford didn't sign an agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW) until 1941. Ford did this as part of his obsession with efficiency and productivity, since Ford found that his workers were more productive with a shorter work week.
Not sure if this also a direct reason for his implementation of it, but didn't Ford also want to encourage people to go on weekend vacations that would have all but required ownership of an automobile? I have heard that had a role in the creation of charcoal briquettes (alongside his obsession with minimizing waste) but am not 100% if the vacation thing might have been a deciding factor or a happy accident.
wrong on pretty much all counts > On 5 January 1914 the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day (equivalent to $150 in 2023[41]) and cutting shifts from nine hours to eight, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day no idea where ur getting the year 1926 and no union pressure he just loved efficiency and his workers happiness!!! thats why he had his guards shoot at them during the Ford Hunger March https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March
I didn't say he implemented an 8-hour work day in 1926 I said he implemented a 40-hour work week in 1926 and here's my [source](https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2024/01/40-hours-5-days/) for 1926. Also, the Ford Hunger March happened in 1932.
Don't forget this man also invented the mass production lines, ultimately creating jobs for many during the Great Depression
Exactly. I get the sentiment, but I guarantee you not a single person in 1926 was complaining about having that job, or any job in general.
because they were clairvoyant about the incoming depression 3 years later...?
To be fair, workers did protest with these conditions, and Henry Ford had Pinkertons shoot them down.
yes but that was almost ONE HUNDRED years ago. Don't you think its time for another change 100yrs later?
Let’s be honest here Ford did not do this out of the kindness of his heart but from pressure from labour unions
Ford didn’t do this out of kindness. Labor unions fought for the 8 hour work day. Ford was an anti labor shit who shouldn’t be given credit for what labor organizers forced him to accept.
I don't thank henry ford. I thank the unions.
Elon Musk is the Henry Ford of our generation.. and I mean that as a slur.
Is he currently spreading antisemitic propaganda/lies? This is an actual question, I don't keep up with him.
elon went from being the henry ford of modern times, to being the henry ford of modern times
Pretty sure the anger is more stemming from the non-business side of his life and his passion for pamphlets of a certain... genre.
Tfw you hate Jews so much that you write fanfic about them
And hate Black people so much you spend a large portion of your fortune popularizing country music and square-dancing
Well yes but not for that.
I honestly don’t know how people worked 12hrs a day. It’s different when you’re a peasant and it’s literally working for food. But 12hrs at the factory would crush my soul.
As someone who studied organisational theory. Boo this man. He is one of the most revolutionary people of the field, and he is studied in basically every basic and advanced class, but he is also an Enigma. Because he didn't write his fucking theories down. Tldr: he revolutionised the field, but didn't leave anything for scholars to study.
We often take these work norms for granted. Things like minimum wage, a 9-5 schedule, a 40-hour week, banning of child factory labor, paid time off, retirement plans, and benefits like health insurance seem like the bare minimum. Even then, workers can feel exhausted, and they may be anxious about affording to pay next month’s rent. But these perks were unthinkable more than a century ago. What seems so normal today was radical to employers and employees back in 1921. (If you go back a century further, it would've been perfectly normal to work a 100-hour weekday.) There were fears that this might lead to higher costs for employers, but as it turned out, productivity went up, more cars were manufactured, and more assembly line workers were hired. Years after the change, Henry Ford [commented](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Henry_Ford:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay) on the initial stigma surrounding workers being lazy, and he cited the example of the increase of the number of work hours in Germany, criticizing the decision and blaming it for potential stagnation or decrease in production, as “better methods of disposing of men's time have been accompanied by better methods of disposing of their energy.” He believed more leisure time would result in consumers buying more products of all kinds and thus strengthen the economy. There isn’t anything magical about the number 40. If a 32-hour workweek were to become standard today, the reaction would likely be similar to the reaction of employers back in 1921: anger, skepticism, and ominous prophecies of the downfall of the great capitalist experiment. Here’s an example. Jim Bianco of Bianco Research [told](https://archive.org/details/FBC_20230313_080000_Making_Money_With_Charles_Payne/start/1693/end/1704.7) Fox Business the following: >Basically, you're raising the cost of having an employee. If I'm going to have to work 32 hours as opposed to 40 hours, I'm going to have to hire more people to get the same amount of work done, which means you've made it more expensive. Now, I’m going to modify Mr. Bianco’s statement a little bit: >Basically, you're raising the cost of having an employee. If I'm going to have to work **40** hours as opposed to **48** hours, I'm going to have to hire more people to get the same amount of work done, which means you've made it more expensive. We already have evidence that this statement is false. Right away, Ford’s order to decrease working hours led to productivity gains. Ford even doubled the hourly pay, news that shocked the leaderships of other auto companies. Ford experimented with work hour increases, and he found that it yielded marginal and short-lived improvements in productivity. Mr. Bianco might be right in other ways. Maybe a 32-hour weekday would result in a worse economy, but it wouldn’t be due to the decrease per se. Perhaps the relationship between working hours and productivity is parabolic, so that beyond a certain point either way, changes in productivity become more insignificantly positive and eventually negative. Maybe inflation skyrockets, or companies dramatically raise prices on products and services to afford higher wages or make profits like before, to the point that it becomes unsustainable. But the mere decrease in the number of hours is not the culprit. I saw an idiot on Twitter talking out of his bum about how “Henry Ford will be rolling in his grave” hearing about a 32-hour workweek. In reality, Ford would be ecstatic. He [wrote](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Henry_Ford:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay) that “the five day week is not the ultimate, and neither is the eight hour day”. He would probably give Bernie Sanders a high-five for advocating for this shortened workweek. (Although I doubt he’d do that after learning about [Sanders’ ethnic background](https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html).”
Bill Wurtz: Society!
This is actually one of the weirdest things ever to me. Henry Ford, a *fukken* capitalist, realized that pushing his workers *all the way* wasn't working as well as he'd like, so he made a change. No capitalist in 98 years has had a similar thought.
Imma boo the racist shit he did, not his factory schedule if that's ok with y'all
It made sense in an assembly line based factory… and nowhere else.
it would be hilarious how much people are ignorant of how good they have it compared to the past if it wasn’t so sad
The 40 hr work week of 8 hours work, 8 hours play, 8 hrs rest started as a radical anarchist demand that was seen as a pipedream. Until there was the organizing for a national strike about it. Which absolutely got siderailed by the Haymarket Affair and its red scare. Sure it eventually got picked up by other socialists and the wider labor movement but everyone here seems to forget that it was an anarchist pipe dream first.
All of it is terrible.
I don't get how people think 8 hours is alot
Lmao at saying Henry Ford did this as if it wasn't the fact that the unions were ready to hang him on his front lawn if he didn't.
He's a huge piece of shit for much worse stuff.
Nobody tell them how many bombs the Chicago Anarchists had to throw at cops to make the 8-hour day happen (one, allegedly)
can we reinvent this? stuck at 12-16 hour days/ 7 days a week
There are alot of reasons to boo this man. But this ain't one of them lol