The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE ROLE OF WAGES IN NATIONAL PROSPERITY
Ford now makes it emphatically clear that high wages are a prerequisite 
for national prosperity. The peril of exporting jobs to China and similar 
places for cheap labor is not intuitively obvious to most businesspeople. 
If, however, American workers do not produce the value with which to 
purchase the goods in question, the goods will rightly go unsold. National 
prosperity, affluence, and also military security depend on the nation’s 
ability to grow, mine, and, most importantly, manufacture wealth.
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I have learned through the years a good deal about wages. I believe in the first 
place that, all other considerations aside, our own sales depend in a measure 
upon the wages we pay. If we can distribute high wages, then that money 
is going to be spent and it will serve to make storekeepers and distributors 
and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their 
prosperity will be reflected in our sales. Country-wide high wages spell coun-
try-wide prosperity, provided, however, the higher wages are paid for higher 
production. Paying high wages and lowering production is starting down the 
incline toward dull business.

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110  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
It took us some time to get our bearings on wages, and it was not until we 
had gone thoroughly into production on “Model T,” that it was possible to fig-
ure out what wages ought to be. Before then we had had some profit sharing. 
We had at the end of each year, for some years past, divided a percentage of 
our earnings with the employees. For instance, as long ago as 1909 we dis-
tributed eighty thousand dollars on the basis of years of service. A one-year 
man received 5 per cent of his year’s wages; a two-year man, 7-1/2 per cent, 
and a three-year man, 10 per cent. The objection to that plan was that it had 
no direct connection with the day’s work. A man did not get his share until 
long after his work was done and then it came to him almost in the way of a 
present. It is always unfortunate to have wages tinged with charity.