Henry Ford Primary Source Analysis

Ben Shain

Prof. Masur

February 24, 2015

"How does Henry Ford describe the intellect of the working people? How does this view affect his ideas about production?"

"It is self-evident that a majority of the people in the world are not mentally-even if they are physically-capable of making a good living. That is, they are not capable of furnishing with their own hands a sufficient quantity of the goods which this world needs to be able to exchange their unaided product for the goods which they need. [Getting Into Production.p217]"

Henry Ford's view of the average worker was not one of laziness; this is not why the work was done slower. His view however was that most people lacked the skill or mental capacity to produce a product that would stand on its own against a product produced by himself or his company, or any other corporation for that matter. This was a time period where in order to make something; you needed the skills and know-how to do so. An unskilled man was not capable of simply building a car engine, but an unskilled man can tighten a bolt, or place a bolt. This is one of the things that Ford was most concerned with; this and the movement of materials/product (assembly line).

Ford organized his building in a way that no space was wasted. Every worker had a space where they worked, a space with a specific job, some of these jobs being more demanding than others, either physically or mentally. The mechanical aspect of the production, for Ford it was automobiles, was approach by the people with the brighter mechanical and engineering minds. They made a system, incorporating assembly lines, that broke down the assembly of an automobile into multiple small jobs to be completed by multiple people and machines alike, and this whole system was completed under one roof.

Efficiency was Ford's main objective. "We put more machinery per square foot of floor space than any other factory in the world-every foot of space not used carries an overhead...