when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft
When I think of the assembly line and the supposedly better working conditions brought in by Ford, I think surely workers would have been clamouring to get these well paying well treated jobs. But the opposite must have been the case where they had to hire nearly 10x the number of men for the number of positions that were to be filled.
I’ve read the article this is from but not yet the book that was inspired by the article. The basic premise is how work evolved from a craft, as something to be proud of and based on skill, to assembly line based where no real skill was required.
The article also lays out how this new assembly line work gave rise to debt. Likely used by employers to hook the employees on regular payments too.
The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has shown in a recent article, through the installment plan, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy
As Lears writes, “Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly.”