One reason why Ford had to raise salaries to the famous five dollars a day was that workers were turned from craftsmen to simple cogs on the assembly line and didn’t want to do that boring and repetitive job.

I feel the same is happening in software. Compared to the 90s it feels much more like assembly line work where a worker does something very specialized and repeats it over and over.

And Ford's wage increase has been famously and misleadingly mythologized as a favor he did to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars. Matthew Crawford's takedown of this bullshit in Shop Class as Soulcraft is delicious.

Obviously Ford was a good salesman and spinster

The fact that so many people seem to believe that any businesses would decide to pay their workers above market value, in hopes that some percentage of that would come back in the form of higher sales, speaks to the marketing success of the Ford Motor Company.

Ford had the idea of a new way to manufacture things, and paid what he needed to in order to get workers who could learn this system and deliver value to him and the shareholders. It also helped that his heyday was in the 1920s, when the US economy was strong, which also colors people's memory. He likely also considered that it's sometimes better to overpay a little to assure you have the workers you need, rather than risk delaying a shipment.

It's the same with tech companies like Google, they're paying what they need to pay to attract the talent they want.

What's funny is that if a modern CEO said something like "We're going to pay our employees better so they can afford our product", it would be immediately seen as self-serving marketing nonsense to hide the actual truth. But the mythical Henry Ford says it, and people believe it. Sigh.

Good point.

More on this here:

https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2015/05/13/karl-marxs-concept...