Ford, Diego Rivera, and capitalism lessons for today

It is complicated, as Diego Rivera brilliantly captured in his ‘Detroit Industry’ murals at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Ford Model A, the main car made at the Rouge factory when it was created.

Henry Ford was an example of an American industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing around the world. For this, he deserves our admiration. The Rouge was his attempt to centralize complex manufacturing to one location, completely under his control. It was a vertically integrated behemoth designed to make cars at tremendous scale. Ford owned mines, shipping, and railroads that fed the steel mills, foundries, glass making, and assembly done at the Rouge. Everything he could control, he did. And he made quality cars at a great price.

In order to attract the labor pool he needed, he doubled the prevailing wage for workers to about $5/day. This action arguably contributed more to the creation of the American middle class than almost any other single event.

All good, right!?

However, Henry Ford was also an asshole and anti-Semite with Nazi tendencies. We should pay attention to this history.

Rivera painted Henry Ford talking to his ‘monkeys’ about a v8 engine in the shape of a dog .. an Aztec companion on a journey to the underworld.

When I say ‘everything he could control, he did’, it also means the humans who worked in his factories, although Ford referred to his employees as ‘monkeys’. The Faustian bargain was that for high pay, worker’s personal behaviors were monitored and controlled. There were ‘social inspectors’ in a Sociological Department who spied on people in their homes, at church, at the ball park … everywhere …  to make sure they didn’t drink, gamble, take on debt, and any other number of lifestyle requirements. They even accessed bank accounts. If an employee failed any particular behavioral test, they lost up to half their pay or could get fired.

Rivera painted this stamping machine to look like Coaticue, the Aztec goddess of creation and destruction.

In other words, Ford developed a surveillance capability well before all our actions are tracked by the modern internet, and misused that power to make money. Do you trust anyone in Big Tech to not do exactly the same thing? Oh right .. .they are already are.

Ford is often held up as a paragon of industrial virtue because of that $5/day pay increase. But the cold reality is that any notion that he treated employees well out of the goodness of his heart should be dispensed with. Things haven’t changed in the last 100 years since the Rouge was created … without external pressure on companies, they will pay employees as close to zilch as they can.

Ford founded the company based on building high quality cars at a low price. But by the 1960’s, American auto manufacturers got lost in the wilderness and sold cars that looked amazing but sucked— bad quality at high prices. The Japanese borrowed American know how and made better and better cars until they usurped American’s brand leadership for quality and price. Now the United States is stuck in the niche of internal combustion engine SUVs and trucks and is barely competitive on lower end cars. This country is so focused on image and brand management that we’ve forgotten that we need to be equally good at the quality of what we do. Corey Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ principle reigns over American industry after industry. Where’s the pride and long term view?

Ford’s attempt at centralizing and controlling all production was astounding — yet the Rouge never had less than 6,000 external suppliers. In the modern world where everything manufactured is infinitely more complex, the very simple goal of ‘made in America’ in a vast global interconnected network of production makes almost no sense. Manufacturing anything complex in today’s world simply requires partnerships and business relationship across country lines. And my apologies for adding this political comment .. but this seems hard for Trump to understand. Yep, enshittification even reigns in politics.

At any rate, just a few of my industrial takeaways from being in Detroit.