January 1914 was a frigid month in Detroit – much like January 2014 has been. Nonetheless, thousands lined up in the bitter cold outside to take Henry Ford up on an extraordinary offer: $5 a day, for eight hours of work in a bustling factory.
If I'm not mistaken, the Ford "Sociological Department" would engage in activities that would be met with outrage today: snooping into employees' personal affairs and questioning friends and family about daily habits. Those who didn't comply to his vision of a well balanced "American" family would have these high wages revoked and their positions terminated. Dig deeper if you wish, I just found it interesting how there was no mention of his tyrannical and sometimes racist policies which were meant to "standardize his workforce" (raise efficiency and productivity), not stimulate the economy.
Not to mention Ford's right hand man and executive in the 30's Harry Bennett who fired into the crowd during the Hunger March in Detroit. And then there was the abject failure of Fordlandia - a true record of absurdity.
Interestingly enough, Obama included in his State of the Union Address that he is going to raise the minimum wage to $10.10
That's a specific case, at the moment. He's using his executive powers to raise the minimum wage for new government contractors to $10.10 per hour. This won't effect existing contracts, and is only a small subset. At the current time it's up to mayors and governors to raise the minimum wage on a local and regional level.
Thank you for that. I'm only half paying attention, and I heard something about raising minimum wage. I did a quick online search for an article and that popped up. Thanks again for clearing that up for me.
I wish a version of this model could be applied to non profit and other social, environmental and non government organizations that provide low cost social services, to incentivise the sector economy and bring more capable staff into it. I am saying this because this model wouldn't be able to be applied today to the government and other industries due the Unions.