The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Productivity Creates High-Wage Jobs
The following material addresses the issue of the restrictive work rules 
that unions often demand to “protect” jobs. Automation does not, con-
trary to the belief of the Luddites, destroy jobs, it creates more and better 
jobs. This section’s statement that “we cannot play fast and loose with eco-
nomic laws, because if we do they handle us in very hard ways,” is mean-
while simply another restatement of the impartial economic leg of Ford’s 
triad. Customers will simply not pay two workers to do a job that can and 
should be performed by one.
The behavioral leg meanwhile requires employers to remember Taylor’s 
warning (1911a, p. 8) against cutting piece rates, or by implication dis-
charging workers when efficiency improvements make them unnecessary. 
If either of these things happen, the worker “is likely entirely to lose sight 
of his employer’s side of the case and become imbued with a grim deter-
mination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it.”
This section then adds the scientific leg of Ford’s triad with the state-
ment: “ An industrial concern which is wide enough awake to reorganize 
for efficiency, and honest enough with the public to charge it necessary 
costs and no more, is usually such an enterprising concern that it has 
plenty of jobs at which to employ the tenth man.” Once again, application 
of the synergistic union of impartial economic, behavioral, and manage-
ment science creates and protects high-wage jobs, while violation of any of 
these considerations can only destroy jobs.
The last paragraph of this section, which also appears in Ford Ideals 
(1922, p. 17) reiterates the need for a square deal in all economic transac-
tions: “When the man gives more than he receives, or receives more than 

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Democracy and Industry  •  231
he gives—it is not long before serious dislocation will be manifest. Extend 
that condition throughout the country, and you have a complete upset of 
business.”
* * *
The workingman himself must be on guard against some very dangerous 
notions—dangerous to himself and to the welfare of the country. It is some-
times said that the less a worker does, the more jobs he creates for other men. 
This fallacy assumes that idleness is creative. Idleness never created a job. It 
creates only burdens. The industrious man never runs his fellow worker out 
of a job; indeed, it is the industrious man who is the partner of the indus-
trious manager—who creates more and more business and therefore more 
and more jobs. It is a great pity that the idea should ever have gone abroad 
among sensible men that by “soldiering” on the job they help someone else. 
A moment’s thought will show the weakness of such an idea. The healthy 
business, the business that is always making more and more opportunities 
for men to earn an honourable and ample living, is the business in which 
every man does a day’s work of which he is proud. And the country that 
stands most securely is the country in which men work honestly and do not 
play tricks with the means of production. We cannot play fast and loose with 
economic laws, because if we do they handle us in very hard ways.
The fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used to 
be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed. He is 
merely not employed on that work, and the public is not carrying the burden 
of his support by paying more than it ought on that work—for after all, it is 
the public that pays!
An industrial concern which is wide enough awake to reorganize for effi-
ciency, and honest enough with the public to charge it necessary costs and 
no more, is usually such an enterprising concern that it has plenty of jobs at 
which to employ the tenth man. It is bound to grow, and growth means jobs. 
A well-managed concern is always seeking to lower the labour cost to the 
public; and it is certain to employ more men than the concern which loafs 
along and makes the public pay the cost of its mismanagement.
The tenth man was an unnecessary cost. The ultimate consumer was pay-
ing him. But the fact that he was unnecessary on that particular job does not 
mean that he is unnecessary in the work of the world, or even in the work of 
his particular shop.
The public pays for all mismanagement. More than half the trouble with 
the world to-day is the “soldiering” and dilution and cheapness and inef-
ficiency for which the people are paying their good money. Wherever two 
men are being paid for what one can do, the people are paying double what 
they ought. And it is a fact that only a little while ago in the United States, 

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232  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
man for man, we were not producing what we did for several years previous 
to the war.
A day’s work means more than merely being “on duty” at the shop for the 
required number of hours. It means giving an equivalent in service for the 
wage drawn. And when that equivalent is tampered with either way—when 
the man gives more than he receives, or receives more than he gives—it is 
not long before serious dislocation will be manifest. Extend that condition 
throughout the country, and you have a complete upset of business. All that 
industrial difficulty means is the destruction of basic equivalents in the shop. 
Management must share the blame with labour. Management has been lazy, 
too. Management has found it easier to hire an additional five hundred men 
than to so improve its methods that one hundred men of the old force could 
be released to other work. The public was paying, and business was boom-
ing, and management didn’t care a pin. It was no different in the office from 
what it was in the shop. The law of equivalents was broken just as much by 
managers as by workmen.