The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

The Employer’s Duty to Address Root 
Causes of Labor Dissatisfaction
Ford’s statement: “The wages paid are always higher than any reasonable 
union could think of demanding and the hours of work are always shorter,” 
shows why there was no identifiable effort to unionize his factories while 
he was actually running them. This also explains why British carpenters 
turned against their own trade union after the Ford Motor Company took 
over the automobile body plant in which they worked.
Unionization was, however, the natural consequence, exactly as Ford 
said it would be, when those in whose charge he left his company’s manage-
ment went against his principles during the late 1930s. Chapter 8 reported 
Upton Sinclair’s (1937, p. 81) description of a no-layoff rule that had been 
established when Ford was actually running his company, but which his 
successors circumvented when productivity improvements made workers 
temporarily unnecessary.
* * *
Merely avoiding strikes, however, does not promote industry. We may say to 
the workingman: “You have a grievance, but the strike is no remedy—it only 
makes the situation worse whether you win or lose.”
Then the workingman may admit this to be true and refrain from striking. 
Does that settle anything?
No! If the worker abandons strikes as an unworthy means of bringing 
about desirable conditions, it simply means that employers must get busy on 
their own initiative and correct defective conditions.
The experience of the Ford industries with the workingman has been 
entirely satisfactory, both in the United States and abroad. We have no 
antagonism to unions, but we participate in no arrangements with either 
employee or employer organizations. The wages paid are always higher than 
any reasonable union could think of demanding and the hours of work are 
always shorter. There is nothing that a union membership could do for our 
people. Some of them may belong to unions, probably the majority do not. 
We do not know and make no attempt to find out, for it is a matter of not the 
slightest concern to us. We respect the unions, sympathize with their good 
aims and denounce their bad ones. In turn I think that they give us respect, 
for there has never been any authoritative attempt to come between the men 
and the management in our plants. Of course radical agitators have tried 

---

Democracy and Industry  •  235
to stir up trouble now and again, but the men have mostly regarded them 
simply as human oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort 
of interest that they would have in a four-legged man.
In England we did meet the trades union question squarely in our 
Manchester plant. The workmen of Manchester are mostly unionized, and 
the usual English union restrictions upon output prevail. We took over a body 
plant in which were a number of union carpenters. At once the union officers 
asked to see our executives and arrange terms. We deal only with our own 
employees and never with outside representatives, so our people refused to 
see the union officials. Thereupon they called the carpenters out on strike. 
The carpenters would not strike and were expelled from the union. Then the 
expelled men brought suit against the union for their share of the benefit fund. 
I do not know how the litigation turned out, but that was the end of interfer-
ence by trades union officers with our operations in England.
We make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. It is absolutely 
a give-and-take relation. During the period in which we largely increased 
wages we did have a considerable supervisory force. The home life of the men 
was investigated and an effort was made to find out what they did with their 
wages. Perhaps at the time it was necessary; it gave us valuable information. 
But it would not do at all as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned.