The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

part suppliers. GM’s own industry association, the Automotive Industry 
Action Group (AIAG), in fact, had worked with the American Society for 
Quality and other organizations to develop a healthcare-specific version 
of the ISO 9001 quality system standard. The result would have been lower 
healthcare premiums along with better care for GM’s workers and retir-
ees. Levinson (2006) recommended this very explicitly, although GM and 
the UAW should have been independently aware of the AIAG’s off-the-
shelf solution.
The statement about leading labor to jobs and wages also applies to the 
Luddism of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), 
which resisted data entry automation out of fear that this might elimi-
nate jobs (Levinson, 2002). The truth is, of course, that a worker can 
receive a higher wage for automated instead of manual data entry, just as 
a mason who used Frank Gilbreth’s nonstooping scaffold could receive 
higher pay than a mason who bent over to pick up each brick. Taylor 
(1911b, pp. 187–188) said of Luddism and soldiering (marking time and 
limiting production) in general, “If their employers are in a competitive 
business, sooner or later those competitors whose workmen do not limit 
the output will take the trade away from them, and they will be thrown 
out of work.”
Ford’s statement below about a “whole set of false theories and promises 
which can never be fulfilled as long as the earth remains what it is” is sim-
ply a restatement of the economic aspect of his universal code. No amount 
of labor negotiations will allow the business to pay wages that its produc-
tivity cannot support. An honest partnership between management and 
labor, however, can apply the scientific leg of the universal code to make 
higher wages possible.

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Democracy and Industry  •  229
* * *
The only strong group of union men in the country is the group that draws 
salaries from the unions. Some of them are very rich. Some of them are inter-
ested in influencing the affairs of our large institutions of finance. Others are 
so extreme in their so-called socialism that they border on Bolshevism and 
anarchism—their union salaries liberating them from the necessity of work 
so that they can devote their energies to subversive propaganda. All of them 
enjoy a certain prestige and power which, in the natural course of competi-
tion, they could not otherwise have won.
If the official personnel of the labour unions were as strong, as honest, as 
decent, and as plainly wise as the bulk of the men who make up the member-
ship, the whole movement would have taken on a different complexion these 
last few years. But this official personnel, in the main—there are notable 
exceptions—has not devoted itself to an alliance with the naturally strong 
qualities of the workingman; it has rather devoted itself to playing upon his 
weaknesses, principally upon the weaknesses of that newly arrived portion 
of the population which does not yet know what Americanism is, and which 
never will know if left to the tutelage of their local union leaders.
The workingmen, except those few who have been inoculated with the fal-
lacious doctrine of “the class war” and who have accepted the philosophy 
that progress consists in fomenting discord in industry (“When you get your 
$12 a day, don’t stop at that. Agitate for $14. When you get your eight hours 
a day, don’t be a fool and grow contented; agitate for six hours. Start some-
thing! Always start something!”), have the plain sense which enables them to 
recognize that with principles accepted and observed, conditions change. The 
union leaders have never seen that. They wish conditions to remain as they 
are, conditions of injustice, provocation, strikes, bad feeling, and crippled 
national life. Else where would be the need for union officers? Every strike is a 
new argument for them; they point to it and say, “You see! You still need us.”
The only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to 
wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and star-
vation. The union of labour which is coming to the fore in this country is 
the union of all whose interests are interdependent—whose interests are alto-
gether dependent on the usefulness and efficiency of the service they render.
There is a change coming. When the union of “union leaders” disappears, 
with it will go the union of blind bosses—bosses who never did a decent thing 
for their employees until they were compelled. If the blind boss was a disease, 
the selfish union leader was the antidote. When the union leader became the 
disease, the blind boss became the antidote. Both are misfits, both are out 
of place in well-organized society. And they are both disappearing together.
It is the blind boss whose voice is heard to-day saying, “Now is the time to 
smash labour, we’ve got them on the run.” That voice is going down to silence 

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230  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
with the voice that preaches “class war.” The producers—from the men at the 
drawing board to the men on the moulding floor—have gotten together in a 
real union, and they will handle their own affairs henceforth.
The exploitation of dissatisfaction is an established business to-day. Its 
object is not to settle anything, nor to get anything done, but to keep dissat-
isfaction in existence. And the instruments used to do this are a whole set of 
false theories and promises which can never be fulfilled as long as the earth 
remains what it is.
I am not opposed to labour organization. I am not opposed to any sort of 
organization that makes for progress. It is organizing to limit production—
whether by employers or by workers—that matters.