The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

INDUSTRY CAN MAKE CHARITY UNNECESSARY
Ford’s industries proved that there were places for a wide variety of work-
ers, including those without traditional skills. Readers of Charles Dickens’ 
Oliver Twist will be familiar with the workhouse (and prison) occupation 
of picking hemp or oakum. This involved picking apart discarded ropes 
for conversion into tarred fiber; an activity that was quite consistent with 
Ford’s subsequent view that waste materials ought to be put to use. It, 
however, was so labor-intensive as to be economical only for prison or, in 
the previous century, workhouse labor. Ford’s position on this was that 
prison labor should produce enough value to allow an inmate to support 
his family, and also that the economic world had enough work available 
that prison labor would not take jobs from free workers.
* * *
Charity becomes unnecessary as those who seem to be unable to earn livings 
are taken out of the non-productive class and put into the productive. In a 
previous chapter I have set out how experiments in our shops have demon-
strated that in sufficiently subdivided industry there are places which can be 
filled by the maimed, the halt, and the blind. Scientific industry need not be 
a monster devouring all who come near it. When it is, then it is not fulfilling 
its place in life. In and out of industry there must be jobs that take the full 
strength of a powerful man; there are other jobs, and plenty of them, that 
require more skill than the artisans of the Middle Ages ever had. The minute 
subdivision of industry permits a strong man or a skilled man always to use 
his strength or skill. In the old hand industry, a skilled man spent a good part 
of his time at unskilled work. That was a waste. But since in those days every 
task required both skilled and unskilled labour to be performed by the one 
man, there was little room for either the man who was too stupid ever to be 
skilled or the man who did not have the opportunity to learn a trade.
No mechanic working with only his hands can earn more than a bare 
sustenance. He cannot have a surplus. It has been taken for granted that, 
coming into old age, a mechanic must be supported by his children or, if he 
has no children, that he will be a public charge. All of that is quite unneces-
sary. The subdivision of industry opens places that can be filled by practi-
cally any one. There are more places in subdivision industry that can be 
filled by blind men than there are blind men. There are more places that 
can be filled by cripples than there are cripples. And in each of these places 
the man who short-sightedly might be considered as an object of charity 
can earn just as adequate a living as the keenest and most able-bodied. It 

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190  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
is waste to put an able-bodied man in a job that might be just as well cared 
for by a cripple. It is a frightful waste to put the blind at weaving baskets. It 
is waste to have convicts breaking stone or picking hemp or doing any sort 
of petty, useless task.
A well-conducted jail should not only be self-supporting, but a man in jail 
ought to be able to support his family or, if he has no family, he should be 
able to accumulate a sum of money sufficient to put him on his feet when he 
gets out of jail. I am not advocating convict labour or the farming out of men 
practically as slaves. Such a plan is too detestable for words. We have greatly 
overdone the prison business, anyway; we begin at the wrong end. But as long 
as we have prisons they can be fitted into, the general scheme of production 
so neatly that a prison may become a productive unit working for the relief of 
the public and the benefit of the prisoners. I know that there are laws—fool-
ish laws passed by unthinking men—that restrict the industrial activities of 
prisons. Those laws were passed mostly at the behest of what is called Labour. 
They are not for the benefit of the workingman. Increasing the charges upon 
a community does not benefit any one in the community. If the idea of service 
be kept in mind, then there is always in every community more work to do 
than there are men who can do it.