Ford's $5 day stopped the line emptying — with a department watching who deserved it

In 1913 the moving assembly line arrived at Highland Park and made the Model T cheap — and the work unbearable. The new methods were so relentless that by late 1913 labour turnover had reached 380 percent: to grow the workforce by 100 men, the company had to hire 963. Men walked off the line and did not come back, and the proudest factory in America could not keep it staffed. The line was the future of manufacturing; the labour it needed was quitting faster than it could be trained.

On 5 January 1914 the board announced the answer: five dollars for an eight-hour day, against the old rate of $2.34 for nine — more than double, and Henry Ford called it profit-sharing, not a wage. No employer had ever offered so much for unskilled work. The newspapers called it a gold rush; thousands of applicants gathered outside the Highland Park plant within days, and the shock ran through the whole industry. The high wage made men willing to endure the discipline of the line — a bargain that, as The Henry Ford's own account puts it, turned out to be as important as the Model T itself.

But the five dollars came with conditions. In practice the new rate went only to workers deemed 'qualified' after an investigation into their private lives by the company's Sociological Department, created to make sure the wages were not squandered. Investigators monitored the personal and work lives of employees, and the department taught hygiene, English and the handling of money. Ford had stopped the line emptying; the price was a department that decided which workers deserved to be paid — and an answer to turnover that fixed nothing about the work itself.