Fordism In America

How beneficial was Fordism in the United States? While it changed production to a faster process, it also changed things in a negative manner. Multiple negative outcomes had been created from this time and is referred to in The Flivver King. The amount of people that had been employed and the number of hours they were given became a main issue. The creator of this system was an anti-Semitic. It saw the increase prevalence of a white supremacist vigilante group Black Legion. Protests from American workers had been formed. There were even spies that got inside the company. Fordism became more prevalent in the United States. For better or worse it started to become ingrained into people’s work lives. People had started to become employed within
They would get bonuses, but they had to be qualified in a specific way. A problem that rose from this is people had to be in one of three types of groups. Married men had to be “living with and taking care of their families” (Sinclair 29). Single men over twenty-two had to be “Living wholesomely,” and “of proved thrifty habits” (Sinclair 29).
With these requirements in place it left some people out of being able to get any kind of bonus. These requirements were vague and completely subjective as there was no clear indication of what the requirements meant. It could be even said that the bonus system was somewhat manipulated. To keep 14,000 men in the before bonus era they had to hire 53,000 a year (Sinclair 31). Not only were wages or bonuses effected for people, but the number of hours’ people worked in a week was cut down drastically. This happening due to the shift to an assembly line mass production approach. As presented in class with the activity of a group of people making paper airplanes similarly to an assembly line. Where once someone had to have more responsibility by building parts and carrying them to other people. It instead turned into everything being simpler and faster for things to get done resulting in not as many hours having to be filled by
With hours plummeting for people, it made it more difficult for people to be able to afford anything or save their money. A consequence of this is the Shutt family having to rent out rooms in their home and themselves ending up being crammed into only two rooms (Sinclair 89).
The prevalence of more of these factory jobs are thanks to Henry Ford. While undeniably a successful man he was also very anti-Semitic. He worried that the Jews would get involved in these jobs. He strongly believed that “Jewish leadership, operating in secret, was trying to destroy Gentile civilization” (Sinclair 56). He believed that the red movement was bad with it being “alien, Jewish, and anti-Christian” (Sinclair 57). He had spread his belief to people through his newspapers The Dear Born Independent and The International Jew (Sinclair 56).
Henry Ford had a desire to rehabilitate people. Mostly focusing on ex-convicts, while this might have started off all right with the American people, it eventually turned into the hiring of ex criminals (Sinclair