The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

The Five-Dollar Work Day
The paternalistic nature of the five-dollar work day, which included inspec-
tion of workers’ homes for certain standards, is certainly not acceptable 
today. The mere concept of a five-dollar work day, however, was very auda-
cious for its time. This book showed previously that Ford would not hire 
women whose husbands worked because he believed that a family should 
be able to live on one income, and this also would not be acceptable today. 
However, he did pay the women he hired the same wages as men in the 
same jobs.
* * *
Having these facts in hand we announced and put into operation in January, 
1914, a kind of profit-sharing plan in which the minimum wage for any class 
of work and under certain conditions was five dollars a day. At the same time 
we reduced the working day to eight hours—it had been nine—and the week 
to forty-eight hours. This was entirely a voluntary act. All of our wage rates 
have been voluntary. It was to our way of thinking an act of social justice, 
and in the last analysis we did it for our own satisfaction of mind. There is a 
pleasure in feeling that you have made others happy—that you have lessened 
in some degree the burdens of your fellow-men—that you have provided a 
margin out of which may be had pleasure and saving. Good-will is one of 
the few really important assets of life. A determined man can win almost 
anything that he goes after, but unless, in his getting, he gains good will he 
has not profited much.
There was, however, no charity in any way involved. That was not gen-
erally understood. Many employers thought we were just making the 
announcement because we were prosperous and wanted advertising and 
they condemned us because we were upsetting standards—violating the cus-
tom of paying a man the smallest amount he would take. There is nothing to 
such standards and customs. They have to be wiped out. Some day they will 
be. Otherwise, we cannot abolish poverty. We made the change not merely 
because we wanted to pay higher wages and thought we could pay them. We 
wanted to pay these wages so that the business would be on a lasting founda-
tion. We were not distributing anything—we were building for the future. A 
low wage business is always insecure.
Probably few industrial announcements have created a more world-wide 
comment than did this one, and hardly any one got the facts quite right. 
Workmen quite generally believed that they were going to get five dollars a 
day, regardless of what work they did.
The facts were somewhat different from the general impression. The plan 
was to distribute profits, but instead of waiting until the profits had been 

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112  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
earned—to approximate them in advance and to add them, under certain 
conditions, to the wages of those persons who had been in the employ of the 
company for six months or more. It was classified participation among three 
classes of employees:
 
(1) Married men living with and taking good care of their families.
 
(2) Single men over twenty-two years of age who are of proved thrifty habits.
 
(3) Young men under twenty-two years of age, and women who are the 
sole support of some next of kin.
A man was first to be paid his just wages—which were then on an average 
of about fifteen per cent above the usual market wage. He was then eligible to 
a certain profit. His wages plus his profit were calculated to give a minimum 
daily income of five dollars. The profit sharing rate was divided on an hour 
basis and was credited to the hourly wage rate, so as to give those receiving 
the lowest hourly rate the largest proportion of profits. It was paid every two 
weeks with the wages. For example, a man who received thirty-four cents an 
hour had a profit rate of twenty-eight and one half cents an hour—which 
would give him a daily income of five dollars. A man receiving fifty-four cents 
an hour would have a profit rate of twenty-one cents an hour—which would 
give him a daily income of six dollars.
It was a sort of prosperity-sharing plan. But on conditions. The man and 
his home had to come up to certain standards of cleanliness and citizen-
ship. Nothing paternal was intended!—a certain amount of paternalism did 
develop, and that is one reason why the whole plan and the social welfare 
department were readjusted. But in the beginning the idea was that there 
should be a very definite incentive to better living and that the very best 
incentive was a money premium on proper living. A man who is living aright 
will do his work aright. And then, too, we wanted to avoid the possibility 
of lowering the standard of work through an increased wage. It was dem-
onstrated in war time that too quickly increasing a man’s pay sometimes 
increases only his cupidity and therefore decreases his earning power. If, in 
the beginning, we had simply put the increase in the pay envelopes, then very 
likely the work standards would have broken down. The pay of about half 
the men was doubled in the new plan; it might have been taken as “easy 
money.” The thought of easy money breaks down work. There is a danger in 
too rapidly raising the pay of any man—whether he previously received one 
dollar or one hundred dollars a day. In fact, if the salary of a hundred-dollar-
a-day man were increased overnight to three hundred dollars a day he would 
probably make a bigger fool of himself than the working man whose pay is 
increased from one dollar to three dollars an hour. The man with the larger 
amount of money has larger opportunity to make a fool of himself.

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Wages  •  113
In this first plan the standards insisted upon were not petty—although 
sometimes they may have been administered in a petty fashion. We had 
about fifty investigators in the Social Department; the standard of common 
sense among them was very high indeed, but it is impossible to assemble 
fifty men equally endowed with common sense. They erred at times—one 
always hears about the errors. It was expected that in order to receive the 
bonus married men should live with and take proper care of their families. 
We had to break up the evil custom among many of the foreign workers of 
taking in boarders—of regarding their homes as something to make money 
out of rather than as a place to live in. Boys under eighteen received a bonus 
if they supported the next of kin. Single men who lived wholesomely shared. 
The best evidence that the plan was essentially beneficial is the record. When 
the plan went into effect, 60 per cent of the workers immediately qualified to 
share; at the end of six months 78 per cent were sharing, and at the end of 
one year 87 per cent. Within a year and one half only a fraction of one per 
cent failed to share.