Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

This sort of thinking drove government policy at the start of the Great Depression. President Hoover tried to maintain high wage rates seeing them as the cause of prosperity and not the effect of greater productivity. Henry Ford was probably the most influential person in this camp but most of American business at the time was on board with it as well.<p>Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" has probably the best analysis of Hoover's proto "New Deal" policies. It's very enlightening if you were taught as I was that Hoover did nothing while the depression ravaged the nation.

<i>But it is the influence of leisure on consumption which makes the short week so necessary. The people who consume the bulk of goods are the people who make them. That is a fact we must never forget -- that is the secret of our prosperity.</i><p>That is pretty evil mastermind... he's thinking on a whole other level.

Amazing article -- I did not know that modern American "consumer culture" was deliberately created by Henry Ford.

This is all great thinking on Ford's part but one piece stands out for me:<p><i>We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.</i><p>I like Ford's approach but he would not be impressed with how restricting the ability to lay off low value workers has damaged our economy. People are even put off of hiring knowing that they might be paying higher unemployment insurance at the end of it, and Europe was dominated (and weighed down) by trade unions for a long time.

Also, look at the business policies and employment benefits first introduced by the Guinness brewery when they were founded. If you want to see how to establish a universally unbeatable brand identity they have a how to guide for the ages.

As with many people, Henry Ford had both his good points and his bad points. Some may feel his sins outweighed his good deeds, but Ford <i>did</i> do a lot of good as well. One needs to take care to not reduce people to a two dimensional caricature. To do so may cause you to dismiss the good and fail to learn valuable lessons.

cool, now get back to your 90hr a week startup...

Ford didn't do this to be nice. He did it because:<p>"we can get at least as great production in five days as we can in six"<p>Smart man. By working them shorter hours, he could work them harder.

Ok. So we are almost 100 years from the last significant reduction of work burden on humanity.<p>How many times industrial technology has doubled its efficiency since then?<p>Why Americans still work as much as then (or even more)? Where the benefits of having better industrial technology went? Is your daily life that much better than life in 1926? Does cost of any advanced piece of equipment that you use now in your life that did not exist back then justifies all of your effort multiplied by our incredible technology that seems to be be missing?

I love the idea that Henry Ford created a culture that had time to use the products that he was creating, and to do it he started with his own employees.<p>"The people with a five day week will consume more goods than the people with a six day week"<p>"the people would not have the time to consume the goods produced. For instance, a workman would have little use for an automobile if he had to be in the shops from dawn until dusk"<p>Genius!

oddly enough this page is blocked at my office...

brilliant<p>goes to show that progress depends on seemingly unreasonable men.

Uhm, Henry Ford was known for violently suppressing unions in his factories. He considered unions to be closely tied to "Jewish Zionist" ambitions. He was also a heavy monetary supporter of Adolf Hitler. In fact, he refused to give back awards he received from the Third Reicht, and was in fact buried with them. Oh, and he was illiterate.<p>So word of advice... don't take advice from Henry Ford.