Engineering social reproduction at Ford, 1910s

In 1913, at the Highland Park factory of the Ford Motor Company, the annual turnover rate reached 370 per cent. In January 1914, management shortened the workday from nine to eight hours and doubled the average daily wage from 2.50 to 5 dollars for those who had ‘passed’ Ford Sociological Department's meticulous inspections into the folds of personal and family life. The ‘sociologists’ analysed three different aspects of the lives of workers: social and biographical information; economic and financial situation of the worker and his family; habits, morality, and more generally the lifestyle of the worker and his family (Meyer III, 1981: 130). The Sociological Department was a specialist branch of Ford's management dedicated to establishing behavioral norms inside and outside the workplace, going from house to house to investigate the private lives of workers. The bundle of rules and norms set up by Ford to mould his workforce into prescribed social rules and turn them into good breadwinners and productive workers was imbued with patriarchal norms. Such control of the private sphere followed obsessive modes of surveillance, aiming to achieve forms of psychological domination that would modify workers’ behavior not only among each other and vis-à-vis management, but that would also follow them into the sphere of social reproduction. The obsession with controlling the private sphere had been a hallmark of Henry Ford for a long period of time (Peña, 1997: 37).

The aim was also to establish rewarding and disciplinary mechanisms for those who would or would not comply with these norms. Such measures must be understood not merely as unilaterally introduced management strategies to better control the workforce, or increase productivity in the plants, but also to respond to and manage emerging workplace conflict, and for the stabilization/mobilization of the workforce. The family wage (May, 1982), for instance, was directly aimed at contrasting with the organizing efforts of the emerging grass-roots union the Industrial Workers of the World, and to increase productivity. Critically, it was also aimed at stabilizing the labour turnover of a workforce made up of three quarters male and, in large part, European migrant workers (Poles, Canadians, and also Germans, Russians, English, Austrians, Italians, and Hungarians) (Bates, 2012: 22).