![]() “We increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and on,” Ford wrote. By 1920, Ford was selling a million cars a year. In 1914, the company sold 308,000 of its Model Ts-more than all other carmakers combined. It might have been just another of Ford’s wild ideas, except that it proved successful. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.” “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.īut Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. “If the floor sweeper’s heart is in his job he can save us five dollars a day by picking up small tools instead of sweeping them out.” Ford believed he was buying higher quality work from all his employees. He recalled asking Ford why he raised wages when every other manufacturer was trying to reduce wages to the lowest acceptable figure. He wrote of his extended interview with Ford in a 1952 book, The Wild Wheel. Ford employees would be “demoralized by this sudden affluence,” and, of course, Ford Motor Company would soon be bankrupt.įortunately, Garrett was able to get an audience with Henry Ford and, over the course of two days, discuss the company’s revolutionary changes. Carmakers who remained and tried to match Ford’s wages would go bankrupt. The higher wages would cause other employers to leave the city, they said. His name was Edward Peter Garrett, but he wrote under the name Garet Garrett, which was how Post readers knew him when he was the magazine’s financial writer between 19.Īrriving in Detroit, Garrett found the city’s manufacturers panicking and predicting various disasters. “We’ll do that.”Ī young reporter from the Times travelled to Detroit to learn more about this revolutionary move. One man snapped, “Why don’t you make it $5 a day and bust the company right?” Every so often Ford walked back in, said: “Not enough,” and walked out.įinally they had doubled the basic pay-up to $4.80 a day. The Ford executives worked all day, cautiously adding 25¢ an hour, and then another 25¢. He tossed down the chalk and said: “Figure out how much more we can give our men.” He wrote on the board the Ford wage standards: minimum pay of $2.34 for a nine-hour day. Check out the article on the former Cannonball Run Record Holder Angry Ursula here.In addition, he was reducing the work day from 9 hours to 8 hours, a significant drop from the 60-hour work week that was the standard in American manufacturing.Īccording to an article (above) in the Post sponsored by the automaker, Ford arrived at the new wage scale during a meeting with his managers. Although they were called in to Police once, they had no encounters with law enforcement, thanks to their precision and care in planning and driving, countermeasures, and a network of scouts staggered along their route. Their moving average was 112mph, and overall average including stops was 110mph. They made it out of Manhattan in just 4.5 minutes and stopped five times for fuel, with a total stopped time of 31 minutes. 2816 miles and just 25 hours and 39 minutes later they pulled into the Portofino parking lot in Redondo Beach, California, beating all previous records. While the timing was no longer ideal given the uptick in traffic and police enforcement, in May of 2020 Arne and Doug, along with spotter Dunadel Daryoush, departed the Red Ball Garage once again. Arne and his team at Cannonball Garage, working around the clock, installed a fuel cell, necessary police countermeasures and disguised the car like a Ford Taurus Police Interceptor in just a few days. Down but not out, Arne and Doug put their heads together, and within a few weeks Arne had procured this 2016 Audi S6 with the requisite performance modifications.
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