Eight-Hour Day: Labor Wins Ground in Industrial Age

Henry Ford doubled his workers'' wages overnight. Not a modest raise, not an incremental adjustment. Double. On January 5, 1914, Ford Motor Company announced a minimum wage of five dollars for an eight-hour day. The average American factory wage at the time was $2.34 for a nine-hour shift. Ford''s competitors thought he had lost his mind. The announcement created immediate chaos. Ten thousand men showed up at the Highland Park plant the next morning hoping to be hired. When the crowd grew unruly, plant security and Detroit police turned fire hoses on them in freezing January temperatures. The Wall Street Journal condemned the move as an "economic crime" and "the application of spiritual principles where they don''t belong." Other industrialists feared Ford was setting a precedent that would bankrupt American manufacturing. Ford''s reasoning was not charitable, though he framed it in moral terms. He had discovered that high turnover was devastating his assembly line. The work was monotonous, grueling, and dehumanizing. In 1913, Ford''s annual turnover rate was 370 percent, meaning he had to hire 52,000 men to maintain a workforce of 14,000. Training new workers constantly was expensive. The five-dollar day solved the retention problem overnight. Turnover plummeted. Productivity increased. Workers who earned enough money became customers who could afford the Model T, which cost $440. The eight-hour day was equally revolutionary. By cutting from nine hours to eight, Ford could run three shifts instead of two, keeping the factory running twenty-four hours. Output increased even as individual hours decreased. Within two years, Ford''s profits doubled from $30 million to $60 million. The five-dollar day proved that paying workers more could make a company richer, an insight that reshaped labor economics. The forty-hour work week became the American standard within a generation, largely because one manufacturer bet that well-paid workers would be more productive and better customers.