Customer Reviews

The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (SUNY Series in American Social History)

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This is a wonderful former dissertation that became a good book, especially important now as we witness the ruin of the US auto industry, with the full complicity of its inmates. Notably, the last people to jump the sinking ship will be the UAW leadership, not the Ford or GM bosses. The UAW bosses need to preserve their pensions, while the Big Auto bosses know they are not in business to make cars, but money. How US auto came to its zombie like state now is, of course, rooted in its past, and Meyer does a fine job getting us in at the start. From Taylor, who sought to strip the mind of the worker on the job and to replace that mind with the mind of the boss, to the Christian benevolent societies that sought to Improve the Foreigners by destroying their culture---and the carrots and sticks that made that possible---all of that is here in the text. And the finger story is worth the price of admission alone.