My Life and Work_Henry Ford

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

with their good aims and denounce their bad ones. In turn I think that they give us respect, for there has never
been any authoritative attempt to come between the men and the management in our plants. Of course radical
agitators have tried to stir up trouble now and again, but the men have mostly regarded them simply as human
CHAPTER XVIII 118
oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort of interest that they would have in a four-legged
man.
In England we did meet the trades union question squarely in our Manchester plant. The workmen of
Manchester are mostly unionized, and the usual English union restrictions upon output prevail. We took over
a body plant in which were a number of union carpenters. At once the union officers asked to see our
executives and arrange terms. We deal only with our own employees and never with outside representatives,
so our people refused to see the union officials. Thereupon they called the carpenters out on strike. The
carpenters would not strike and were expelled from the union. Then the expelled men brought suit against the
union for their share of the benefit fund. I do not know how the litigation turned out, but that was the end of
interference by trades union officers with our operations in England.
We make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. It is absolutely a give-and-take relation. During
the period in which we largely increased wages we did have a considerable supervisory force. The home life
of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find out what they did with their wages. Perhaps at the
time it was necessary; it gave us valuable information. But it would not do at all as a permanent affair and it
has been abandoned.
We do not believe in the "glad hand," or the professionalized "personal touch," or "human element." It is too
late in the day for that sort of thing. Men want something more than a worthy sentiment. Social conditions are
not made out of words. They are the net result of the daily relations between man and man. The best social
spirit is evidenced by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all. That is the
only way to prove good intentions and win respect. Propaganda, bulletins, lectures--they are nothing. It is the
right act sincerely done that counts.
A great business is really too big to be human. It grows so large as to supplant the personality of the man. In a
big business the employer, like the employee, is lost in the mass. Together they have created a great
productive organization which sends out articles that the world buys and pays for in return money that
provides a livelihood for everyone in the business. The business itself becomes the big thing.
There is something sacred about a big business which provides a living for hundreds and thousands of
families. When one looks about at the babies coming into the world, at the boys and girls going to school, at
the young workingmen who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying and setting up for themselves, at the
thousands of homes that are being paid for on installments out of the earnings of men--when one looks at a
great productive organization that is enabling all these things to be done, then the continuance of that business
becomes a holy trust. It becomes greater and more important than the individuals.
The employer is but a man like his employees and is subject to all the limitations of humanity. He is justified
in holding his job only as he can fill it. If he can steer the business straight, if his men can trust him to run his
end of the work properly and without endangering their security, then he is filling his place. Otherwise he is
no more fit for his position than would be an infant. The employer, like everyone else, is to be judged solely
by his ability. He may be but a name to the men--a name on a signboard. But there is the business--it is more
than a name. It produces the living--and a living is a pretty tangible thing. The business is a reality. It does
things. It is a going concern. The evidence of its fitness is that the pay envelopes keep coming.
You can hardly have too much harmony in business. But you can go too far in picking men because they
harmonize. You can have so much harmony that there will not be enough of the thrust and counterthrust
which is life--enough of the competition which means effort and progress. It is one thing for an organization
to be working harmoniously toward one object, but it is another thing for an organization to work
harmoniously with each individual unit of itself. Some organizations use up so much energy and time
maintaining a feeling of harmony that they have no force left to work for the object for which the organization
was created. The organization is secondary to the object. The only harmonious organization that is worth
CHAPTER XVIII 119
anything is an organization in which all the members are bent on the one main purpose--to get along toward
the objective. A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely desired--that is the great harmonizing
principle.
I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling"
around him before he can do his work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental
and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on "feeling," they are failures. Not only are they
business failures; they are character failures also; it is as if their bones never attained a sufficient degree of
hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet. There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in
our business organizations. People have too great a fondness for working with the people they like. In the end
it spoils a good many valuable qualities.
Do not misunderstand me; when I use the term "good feeling" I mean that habit of making one's personal likes
and dislikes the sole standard of judgment. Suppose you do not like a man. Is that anything against him? It
may be something against you. What have your likes or dislikes to do with the facts? Every man of common
sense knows that there are men whom he dislikes, who are really more capable than he is himself.
And taking all this out of the shop and into the broader fields, it is not necessary for the rich to love the poor
or the poor to love the rich. It is not necessary for the employer to love the employee or for the employee to
love the employer. What is necessary is that each should try to do justice to the other according to his deserts.
That is real democracy and not the question of who ought to own the bricks and the mortar and the furnaces
and the mills. And democracy has nothing to do with the question, "Who ought to be boss?"
That is very much like asking: "Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?" Obviously, the man who can sing
tenor. You could not have deposed Caruso. Suppose some theory of musical democracy had consigned Caruso
to the musical proletariat. Would that have reared another tenor to take his place? Or would Caruso's gifts
have still remained his own?
CHAPTER XIX 120
CHAPTER XIX
WHAT WE MAY EXPECT
We are--unless I do not read the signs aright--in the midst of a change. It is going on all about us, slowly and
scarcely observed, but with a firm surety. We are gradually learning to relate cause and effect. A great deal of
that which we call disturbance--a great deal of the upset in what have seemed to be established institutions--is
really but the surface indication of something approaching a regeneration. The public point of view is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Podobne