The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

CAPITAL AND LABOR ARE PARTNERS, NOT ADVERSARIES
This section summarizes the entire science of industrial and labor rela-
tions in a single sentence: “It ought to be the employer’s ambition, as leader, 
to pay better wages than any similar line of business, and it ought to be 
the workman’s ambition to make this possible.” The interdependence of 
the employer and employee is common sense, but far too many businesses 
treat the workforce as a necessary evil and unfortunate expense.
Ford (1922, p. 42) adds explicitly that, while Labor can do very little 
without Capital, Capital is equally helpless without Labor. If the worker 
cannot produce much more than a subsistence level of existence outside 
an organized factory and its supply chain, the factory cannot operate 
without workers. It is, therefore, counterproductive and dysfunctional for 
either to try to exploit the other.
Ford’s statement: “If an employer urges men to do their best, and the 
men learn after a while that their best does not bring any reward, then they 
naturally drop back into ‘getting by’” is entirely consistent with Frederick 
Winslow Taylor’s (1911a, p. 8) explanation of the causes of soldiering, or 
marking time:
… after a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing 
lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and 
increased his output, he is likely entirely to lose sight of his employer’s side 
of the case and become imbued with a grim determination to have no more 
cuts if soldiering can prevent it.
Note also the reiteration of the economic, scientific, and behavioral legs 
of Ford’s universal code. Neither employee nor employer can receive more 
wealth than they produce, but the science of Lean manufacturing allows the 

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Wages  •  103
production of more value. The behavioral element warns meanwhile that 
the frontline worker is, to use Taylor’s words, “entirely likely to lose sight of 
his employer’s side of the case” if the employer follows up on productivity 
improvements by cutting the workforce. Sinclair (1937, p. 81) added explic-
itly of the Ford Company’s practices after Ford delegated control to others:
Twenty men who had been making a certain part would see a new machine 
brought in and set up, and one of them would be taught to operate it and do 
the work of the twenty. The other nineteen wouldn’t be fired right away—
there appeared to be a rule against that. The foreman would put them 
at other work, and presently he would start to “ride” them, and the men 
would know exactly what that meant.
Ford (1922, p. 46) condemns explicitly the practice of laying off workers 
during slack times, which, in combination with Sinclair’s statement, sug-
gests almost unequivocally that there was a no-layoff rule at the company. 
The foremen had by 1937 found ways to work around this rule, or violate 
its spirit without going against its letter. Sinclair (1937, p. 76) also made 
it emphatically clear that Ford, regardless of his title, was no longer in 
charge: “Henry’s plant was ten times as big, and Henry himself was old; 
he left his troubles to others, and avoided knowing what they were doing.”
What they were doing led directly to the unionization that Ford prob-
ably regarded as an insult because he regarded unionization as a natural 
and even justified reaction to “bosses who never did a decent thing for 
their employees until they were compelled” (see Chapter 18). He simply 
did not realize that the people to whom he had left the management of his 
business had gone against his core principles.
* * *
First get at the relationships. It is not usual to speak of an employee as a