October 7, 2026: When A Pay Raise Came With an Inspector

Podcast: bsnsHistory · bsnsBasics

Opublikowano: 2026-10-07

Everyone knows Ford doubled wages to five dollars a day. Almost nobody knows what it actually took to keep the full amount. On October 7, 1913, Ford's Highland Park plant began assembling Model T chassis on a moving line, a process innovation so punishing to the workers running it that annual turnover climbed above 370 percent within months. The famous five dollar day announced that January was Ford's fix for the crisis, but roughly half the wage was a conditional bonus, and the company created a Sociological Department that sent fifty investigators into employees' homes with a 150-question checklist covering...