°The family ford
When the Reverend Marquis, Director of Henry Ford’s Sociology Department from 1915 to 1921, remarked that “Mr Ford’s business is the making of men, and he manufactures automobiles on the side to defray the expenses of his main business”, he was not merely, if wryly, pointing out the contingency of line-production on certain masculine norms. Though that was true enough.
In its early stages, the touted efficiencies of the assembly line were hampered by a pronounced indiscipline that, for the most part, took shape as persistent disinterest and avoidance. At the time, Ford’s car assembly plant had an annual turnover rate of almost four times the total workforce. Levels of daily absenteeism hovered around 10 per cent. In other words, the experience of ‘de-skilling’ that came about with the distancing of managerial oversight from line-work, sometimes regarded by floor-workers as tantamount to emasculation, produced an irregularity that, prior to the austerity of the 1929 Depression and the total social mobilisations of WWII, could not be made to harmonise with the routinised monotony of the labour process. And so, in 1914, with the help of his Sociology Department, Ford introduced, most notably, the ‘family wage’. While it is important to note that the ‘family wage’ did not become generalised for some time, and was hardly global in its reach, it nevertheless remains noteworthy that, before the turn of the century to the mid-20th century, it went from being denounced as a socialist measure to being an article of faith among unions, employers and reformers alike. Higher than average at the time, paid only to men as a ‘breadwinner’s wage’ and, so, functioning to expel women from the factory, the ‘family wage’ was also conditional upon remaining in employ for longer than six months and the fulfilment of a moral code around sex and alcohol that extended beyond the factory. What transported the ‘family wage’ doctrine from the outlandish to the commonplace was, precisely, the confluence of normativity and labour process – which is to say: the reorganisation of at once racialised and gendered attachments through a complex redistribution of compensations, exclusions and hierarchies that were as libidinal as they were spatial, monetary and semantic. The exemplary Fordist worker was the dependable citizen-husband. Significantly however, it was the particular way in which Ford conceived the ledgering, disbursements and elements of the wage that provided the decisive innovation that would recognise and transform the delineations of public and private, economic and intimate, factory and household, citizen and subject and, not least, labour and sex.
In My Life and Work, discussing the physical exertions of the socialised man, he wrote:
If only the man himself were concerned, the cost of his maintenance and the profit he ought to have would be a simple matter. But he is not just an individual. He is a citizen, contributing to the welfare of the nation. He is a householder. He is perhaps a father with children who must be reared to usefulness on what he is able to earn. We must reckon with all these facts. How are you going to figure the contribution of the home to the day’s work? You pay the man for his work, but how much does that owe to his home? How much to his position as citizen? How much to his position as father? The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. The shop must pay them both. On what system of figuring is the home going to find its place in the cost sheets of the day’s work?
Nation, factory and household would each have their column in the balance sheet, echoing Frederick Taylor’s eye for the detailed microphysics of time and motion, but in this instance combining statistical norm with a fraternal, racialised heteronormativity – the “making of men” – as its ordering principle. The male line-worker, in compensation for the alienation of managerial purview, was to be enticed to instead look upon the nation’s welfare as his personal duty, just as the payment of the wage to him alone invited him to assume a prudent proprietalism toward his wife and, not least, his children’s upbringing as future workers. Yet, the exclusion of women from paid factory work and their relegation to the unpaid work of the household – increasingly defined as work and subject to its own versions of scientific management and industrialisation – was not entirely a matter of their expulsion from a strata of higher paid work. Nor were the intersections formed between the ‘wages of whiteness’ and the ‘family wage’ – where, for instance, non-citizens were paid a percentage of the ‘family wage’ – simply directed toward the reiteration of the border in and at the gates of the factory. It was not only, to put it briefly, a question of the gendered, racialised distribution of economic dependency and property rights. As Lewchuk has suggested, the recourse to the ‘family wage’ came about because “it was unclear if time could be converted into effort as efficiently in a mixed-gender workforce”. The question being implicitly posed, then, was how to reorient affect, bodies and arousal, toward the simultaneously heteronormative and productive in spheres both demarcated and affiliated through accounting. Put another way: this particular form of ledgering coincided with the rise of statistical norm and and its deviations, pattern and detail, demand management and the virtue of deferred gratification, all swerving off the unassimilable perplexity of ‘unknown probabilities’ that could not be assigned to any column or measured by them. But if the Fordist approach eventually faltered on bundles of public debt as the fiscal, socialised trace of that epistemically ‘unknowable’ variable, the shift to post-Fordism might well be characterised as the reversal of Ford’s initial separation of management and labour, leveraging the oikopolitical nexus of nation, family and labour through intimate calibrations of risk-assessment, accountability, and desire.
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An unpolished fragment of a draft, preliminary sketches around transformations of the oikopolitical. Obviously something of a rewriting of some very old stuff, and Tronti/Negri - not ‘independant variable’ so much as ‘unknown probabilities’ (Keynes’ queer moment, as it were); an emphasis on the gendered/racialised aspects of the ’social worker’; and, for those reasons and more, an underlining of the liberal aspects of ‘autonomy’. Written yesterday, so all to be elaborated, shifted around.
The above photo is taken from here.
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