°Fraternity
Some readings, notes on Henry Ford, the ‘family wage’, the ‘working week” and the normative.
Mr Ford’s business is the making of men, and he manufactures automobiles on the side to defray the expenses of his main business. - Reverend S.S. Marquis, Director Ford Sociology Department, 1915-21.
[The ‘family wage’ is] the sex/gender/family system that prescribes earning as the sole responsibility of husbands and unpaid domestic labor as the only proper long-term occupation for women - Linda Gordon, Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935, p53.
Responding to an annual turnover rate of 370% and levels of daily absenteeism of 10%, in 1914 Henry Ford effectively doubled wage levels pending certain conditions and definitions: it was defined as a ‘family wage’ and to be paid to a male ‘breadwinner’, would only be paid if the worker stayed in employ for longer than six months, exercised proper sexual and familial relations, did not drink, and so on.
Martha May, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day,” Feminist Studies, 8:2, 1982.
Martha May and Ron Rothbart, “‘Homes Are What Any Strike Is About’: Immigrant Labor and the Family Wage,” Journal of Social History, 23:2, 1989.
Katherine Benton-Cohen, “Docile Children and Dangerous Revolutionaries - The Racial Hierarchy of Manliness and the Bisbee Deportation of 1917″, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 24:2&3, 2003:
Mexican wages were defined as a percentage of white wages, which in turn were defined in terms of “family wage ideology.” This principle held that a man working full-time should be not just the primary, but the breadwinner, in his family. As Marsha May and Linda Gordon have observed, family wage ideology enjoyed wide consensus among workers, employers, and reformers. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris has shown that women’s low wages suffered from the assumption that women were not breadwinners. 11
As in other industrial communities, in Bisbee the family wage ideology was useful to employers and workers alike: Bisbee had a reputation as one of the best-paid mining camps in the West precisely because the mining companies wanted to entice family men in order to reduce turnover. As one C&A official explained in 1907, “the robust American with a growing family and home ties is a better man for us than a man without these things.” To entice these robust specimens, companies supplemented wages with family-friendly philanthropy like home-owning schemes, school-building, park maintenance, and a preference for keeping on married men during lay-offs. These were offers benefited mainly those who were earning white wages. Just as David Roediger has summarized W. E. B. DuBois to argue that the “wages of whiteness” include the “psychological wage” of being white, so too did Bisbee’s family wage package include forms of compensation not found in a pay envelope. The “wages of whiteness” were family wages.
Wayne A. Lewchuk, “Men and Monotony: Fraternalism as a Managerial Strategy at the Ford Motor Company”, Journal of Economic History, 53:4, 1993:
women were excluded from [early assembly-line] production not because men were being paid a high wage, but rather because it was unclear if time could be converted into effort as efficiently in a mixed-gender workforce. The exclusion of women was part of a broader strategy by Ford to reshape masculinity along lines more consistent with conditions in a mass-production factory. Ford consciously excluded women from the workplace and created a fraternal system, a men’s club, to help male workers adjust to a world of monotonous repetitive work. In the process, Ford and his managers shifted both gender norms at work and standards of labor productivity; they also helped to remodel the family and the role of working-class men in society. The Ford strategy gave real meaning to Marquis’s claim that “Mr. Ford’s business is the making of men.”
See also:
Henry Ford, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.
Steve Meyer, “Rough Manhood: The Aggressive and Confrontational Shop Culture of U.S. Auto Workers During World War II” (Journal of Social History, 36.1, 2002).
