Many contemporaries claimed the \$5 figure – unrivalled anywhere else – was simply a publicity stunt, while others said it betokened a unique perception on the behalf of the Ford Company: higher wages weren’t only needed to retain staf, but also to ensure the people making the cars could also aford to buy them.
It was to be that second interpretation which made more sense over time. Today it seems undeniable that Ford intuited how industries based on mass consumption, like the embryonic car industry, require ordinary people to enjoy leisure as much they endure work. That would explain why Ford also supported the eight-hour day and the five-day week, writing of the latter, in 1926, ‘It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.’
Those words drove at the heart of how twentieth-century capitalism came to view itself: functioning properly, the system allowed employees to buy the goods and services their work had created. This proved the basis for a compromise across classes built on rising productivity, profits for the wealthy and progressively improving living standards for everyone else.
For a long time things seemed to go to plan, with improvements in productivity feeding through to higher wages and an increasingly widespread abundance. As a result Reuther’s response appeared unduly pessimistic – the conclusion of someone with a political bias against the consequences of technological change. And yet today, as the Economist’s rhetorical challenge makes clear, it is one of the key questions shaping our future. Nobody, so far at least, has a definitive answer.
Full Automation
71