On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

But Ford didn’t take their complaints very seriously. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he appeared to believe that workers didn’t actually mind jobs that were monotonous, unrewarding, and physically exhausting. He wouldn’t want that sort of thing himself, of course, but he saw himself as practically a different species than the oxlike laborers on his lines: Repetitive labour—the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way—is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. Ford goes on to write that, anyway, the repetitive nature of work on his assembly lines wasn’t so different from the repetitive work done by bankers and businessmen. “Here he veers off into fantasy,” writes Richard Snow in his excellent biography of Ford, I Invented the Modern Age: Bankers and businessmen rarely walked off their jobs in disgust after five days. Just when the efficiencies of the moving assembly line had proved themselves at the end of 1913, the Ford managers discovered that they were having to hire 963 workers to be assured 100 of them would stay with their jobs long enough to learn them. You read that right: during the first year of Ford’s assembly line, turnover at the Crystal Palace was 378 percent. That’s unbelievable, even compared to Convergys and Amazon—that would be the...