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But with the Supreme Court decision in its pocket, U. A. W. thought it was sitting much prettier than Harry Bennett last week. It now has bargaining contracts with most of the industry, including General Motors and Chrysler Corp., where managements accept union leaders as spokesmen for the workers. And last week U. A. W. thought it was on the cards that it would soon be the accepted spokesman for Ford workers too. When it was, it was going to squawk about: 1) the speedup, 2) lack of seniority rules to protect the older workers, 3) the service department, 4) the absence of any machinery to adjust grievances.
U. A. W. points out that Ford wages are no longer the highest in the industry. The average wage at Ford is a fraction over 90¢ an hour, which is under the average wage for the industry (95¢). Average wages at both Chrysler and G. M. are over $1. Privately, other automakers look at Ford askance, convinced that he is bucking the tide, that so far as labor policy is concerned he is still rattling along in the Model T era.
Nevertheless, a poll taken in the spring of 1940 by FORTUNE of a cross-section of working people showed that 73.6% believed Ford had been "helpful to labor." He topped Senator Wagner, Madam Secretary Perkins and John L. Lewis by comfortable percentages.
"I Got a Ford." As far as Henry Ford is concerned, the Model T era was a pretty good one to stay in. Son of an Irish immigrant, he lavished the hours he could spare from his job at Detroit Electric Co. working on a "horseless carriage." When he had one he thought would work, he persuaded eleven businessmen to finance him and went into production. Cars were then a luxury. Ford's aim was a car for every man. He had his plans, translated them into four cylinders, four wheels and the frugal minimum of sheet steel. From a crude assembly line in Detroit, Model Ts began to jerk—10,660; 19,051; 34,858; 76,150 a year—200,000 as the assembly line smoothed out.
By 1912, Associate James Couzens had 7,000 dealers at work selling Model Ts; Ford Motor Co. was doing 40% of the U. S. automobile business. Up & down the country rattled the Tin Lizzies, leaving a spoor of lunch boxes, fruit skins, pop bottles, flat tires. The U. S. was on wheels and Henry Ford, the master of Mass Production, had put it there. More than any man in the 20th Century, with the exception of his good friend Thomas Edison, he had changed the way of men's living. He did so by originating a means of getting a useful instrument in many people's hands at lower & lower cost, and in so doing had shown his own country and the world the way to distribute many other useful instruments to the millions.
In 1919, in a $105,260,000 deal, Ford & Son Edsel had bought out all remaining stockholders. Ford hated bankers ("a lot of Jews sitting around smoking cigars . . ."), and balked their every effort to horn in on him. In 1927 Ford decided to retool his machines, give the world Model A, a blood brother to T, but up-to-date, sleeker, slicker than a whistle. He sold 1,310,000 of them in 1929.