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Henry Ford uses Taylorism, division of labour and the assembly line to manufacture automobiles, and other industries in the United States, as well as Britain, France, Italy, Soviet Union and elsewhere follow his example. The productivity dividends that are gained allow American workers to enjoy high pay and affordable consumer goods as compensation. However workers become increasingly frustrated from the physically demanding and alienating aspects of the assembly line (depicted in Modern Times, Brave New World and À nous la liberté). The Great Depression weakens worker bargaining power, but after a series of strikes in the 1930s and 1940s trade unions emerge victorious, and instruments like the Matignon Agreements in France are established to buttress workers' rights.
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00:28Satsang with Mooji
01:01A Hollywood film salutes the American working man.
01:30Through the destinies of men.
01:34And now behold labor's triumph, the smooth glistening body of machine, the song of victory.
01:41Here is no straining of human flesh.
01:44The spirit of steel.
01:47The joyous chant of potions.
01:50The exultant twirling of spinning wheels.
01:52The thunder of untiring systems.
01:55It is a song of the dynamo.
01:58It is a song that labor sings in tribute to science and invention.
02:05Higher profits are being generated as fast as new machinery and production methods are introduced.
02:13But the greatest single advance is mass production itself through the moving assembly line.
02:21Starting in the car industry, the assembly line is transforming the daily lives of millions of people.
02:34Never before has a change in the way people work brought so much wealth, but also so much alienation and
02:41conflict.
02:55By the start of the 20th century, the great shift from the country to the cities was well underway.
03:02In Europe, the best paid workers were those who had moved to the new factories that produced the heavy machinery
03:07of the industrial age.
03:12The most respected were those whose combined physical strength and skill had taken years to acquire.
03:19Boilermakers, riveters, foundry men.
03:27As the age of steam gave way to electricity and oil, the nature of the work to be done changed
03:33too.
03:40Small engines needed a new type of precision.
03:43The skilled men who built them belonged to craft unions and worked at their own pace.
03:56Despite the manufacturers' hopes, this was not to be the century of the motorbike.
04:03The new machine that would do most to change both the world and the way people worked was the car.
04:41Thousands of craftsmen worked for the many companies competing for a share of the new market before the First World
04:46War.
04:49In Britain, the Vulcan Motor Company were proud to film the way their workers assembled cars so slowly, by hand.
04:58Charles Hill started as a Vulcan apprentice when he was 14.
05:04Everybody seemed to be busy doing something.
05:07And it was only as you went through and going through it yourself, you realized that every man was, in
05:16one sense, a specialist in his own particular job.
05:20There were men, skilled men there when I went there.
05:23They were there all the life to the dying day.
05:27All skilled craftsmen in their own sphere.
05:31In the body shop, there was a lot of wood framing of the motorcar body.
05:36And then there was panel beaters who, to take the shape of panels on a car, it was done with
05:43hammers.
05:44To bend them round and make bulbous corners, it was all done with a planishing hammer.
05:53Craftsmen controlled the way they did their work.
05:55The whole process took several weeks from start to finish, and they took pride in the results.
06:05You were walking down Lord Street, the main town, and see these cars.
06:10Cars that you'd actually worked on, and people riding in cars.
06:15And cars were more of a novelty than they are today.
06:19And it gave you an ego.
06:25It was a time when a wide gulf separated those who built cars from those who bought them.
06:34But the days when cars were just luxuries for the rich were drawing to a close.
06:45America now set the pace in engineering and production.
06:49European managers and workers knew that what was happening in American factories pointed the way of the future.
07:00And in 1908, one man had a vision that would change manufacturing and create a new market.
07:07Henry Ford set out to make the simplest car ever.
07:10A car for rural America.
07:12A 20th century equivalent of the covered wagon.
07:18The little old Ford rambled right along and the little old Ford rambled right along.
07:24The gas ran out in the big machine, but the darned little Ford don't need gasoline.
07:29The big limousine had to back downhill, but the blamed little Ford is going up still.
07:34When it runs out of dope, just fill it up with soap and the little Ford will ramble right along.
07:40To produce the Model T as cheaply as he wanted, Ford knew he had to change the way cars were
07:45built.
07:46That meant changing the way his workers worked.
07:52As he reorganized his factory to turn out Model Ts, he was influenced by the efficiency expert, Frederick Taylor.
07:59Taylor had complained that hardly a workman can be found who doesn't devote his time to studying just how slowly
08:05he can work.
08:06And then he devoted his life to speeding them up.
08:14When Taylor was brought in, he first timed the workers with stopwatches and noted every movement they made.
08:24In a famous experiment at an ironworks, he reorganized a worker called Schmidt.
08:30Previously, Schmidt had hand-carried 12 tons of pig iron a day up from a wagon.
08:34After Taylor rearranged things, the forbearing Schmidt found himself carrying 47 tons, and production had been raised 300%.
08:45Called into an office, Taylor helped the world's fastest typist type even faster.
08:50The new world record of 150 words a minute was achieved by Margaret Owen, but Taylor claimed much of the
08:56credit.
09:00At Ford's factory, Taylorism meant dividing car production into simple, repetitive steps.
09:08There was to be no need for skilled craftsmen with years of apprenticeship.
09:14Men could learn to do any job quickly.
09:18A trained wheelwright no longer made each wheel in its entirety.
09:24Wheel making was broken down into almost 100 stages, done by different men at different machines.
09:33It was much faster, but workers could still complete only 200 cars a day.
09:38So in 1913, Ford introduced his most revolutionary change yet.
09:48In those days, each car was built from the frame up on stationary wooden horses.
09:56Later, the company filmed a reconstruction of how Ford tried out his new idea.
10:03Henry Ford watched it for a while, and he had an inspiration.
10:07Instead of moving the men past the cars, why not move the cars past the men?
10:16So on one hot August morning, they tried it that way.
10:20A husky young fellow put a rope over his shoulder, and Henry Ford called, let's go.
10:34And at that very moment, as the workmen began to fasten the parts onto the slowly moving car,
10:39the assembly line was born.
10:46To deliver the parts to the exact point on the line,
10:49engineers put in a network of clanking conveyors.
10:55They were running for the length of the building, like, you know,
11:00like carrying the parts.
11:02Instead of carrying it by hands,
11:04the conveyors would carry it on the lines.
11:08And it was really marvelous the way things moved.
11:13Not one brain was doing that.
11:15There was a lot of brains working together.
11:20The workers became an integrated part of the great machine,
11:23and the management set the speed it ran at,
11:26without discussion or negotiation,
11:29for unions were forbidden.
11:32The men faced new pressure,
11:34as the final assembly line beat out the rhythm for the whole factory.
11:38There was no way they could stop or slow it down.
11:47Few stood the pace and din for long.
11:50Men tried it for a few weeks, and then quit.
11:54But Ford had an answer.
11:56The company was making record profits.
11:58The time taken to build each car had dropped to one and a half hours.
12:02So he could afford to raise pay.
12:07When he announced he was doubling wages to the unheard-of level of $5 a day,
12:12the factory was besieged by applicants.
12:14Red Coal was 18 when he started at Ford.
12:18The thing about Mr. Ford that stuck in my mind mostly was that he started to pay $5 a day.
12:26And Mr. Ford to me was like a god.
12:29He was like a god.
12:32Because he had the control of so many thousands of people,
12:37and he had them in such order.
12:40The lines, the production lines, the coming and going, the shifts, three shifts,
12:46eight hours each shift, days, afternoons, and midnights.
12:50And everything to me was so clockwork that I was so proud to be a part of it.
12:54I loved it.
12:58By 1920, Detroit was a boom town.
13:01Its population had grown fourfold since 1900.
13:06Other car makers adopted the Ford method.
13:09His recipe, mass production, low costs, high wages,
13:13was creating not only cheap cars, but well-paid workers.
13:22Ford built a new factory, which was the largest in the world.
13:26At the River Rouge plant, coal, iron, sand, and rubber were delivered at one end,
13:31and 2,500 Model Ts a day streamed out of the other.
13:36Up to 80,000 men worked there.
13:42I was lost.
13:44You know, I was really lost with the size of it and the noise of it,
13:49and where you hung your clothes, where you ate your lunch,
13:54where did you put your lunch.
13:57You just, you just didn't know.
13:59And, and, uh, you was afraid to go anyplace.
14:03Seeing these fellas doing one thing, somebody else is doing another thing,
14:07and all this different machinery, it was amazing to see all this.
14:11It was amazing.
14:15Above all, it was the constant supply of new men arriving in Detroit that made it possible.
14:22The company set the terms.
14:24Provided they worked fast and obeyed orders, they got the wages.
14:29Over 70% were recent immigrants,
14:31so the company had its own language schools.
14:35I fill the kettle with water.
14:37And Ford played the different groups off against each other,
14:40Italians and Poles,
14:42Germans and Greeks,
14:44white American and black,
14:45to keep up the speed.
14:47They said,
14:48Nigger, if you don't want to keep that, get that production,
14:51we got some hunkies out here,
14:53and Miller Road will do it.
14:54They'd go back to a southern white guy,
14:57and they'd say,
14:57Look, if you crackers can't get this production,
15:01we got some dagos and some niggers out there on Miller Road
15:06can do to say,
15:06We'll take your job.
15:09Ford's private security force,
15:11the Plant Protection Service,
15:13kept discipline.
15:14Anyone who recruited for the unions was fired.
15:18Company spies kept a lookout for those considered to be troublemakers.
15:24Instead, Ford stressed all the material benefits high pay could bring.
15:28Workers were encouraged to put part of their wages aside each week
15:31towards their own car in a company-run savings scheme.
15:36and there's a lot of money until they sit under the Capitol.
16:12You were in the box, you know. You can afford this, you can afford that, you can afford a new
16:17car.
16:23In 1924, the 10 millionth Model T rolled off the line. Ford's advertising department made the most of it.
16:31As the car was driven from coast to coast, it crossed a country that was being transformed by the moving
16:37assembly line.
16:46For America, the 1920s were the start of a consumer society in which a whole range of new products came
16:53within reach of ordinary people.
17:04Factories now turned out furniture and ready-made clothes.
17:11Electric appliances were cheaper than ever before.
17:19The cycle had started. Mass production was feeding mass consumption, leading to yet more production.
17:29The radio had almost as great an impact as the car, bringing advertising and popular music into the home.
17:38When a Philadelphia company wanted to make the cheapest wireless yet, they took on a new workforce.
17:44They needed no experience or electrical knowledge, so long as they were nimble enough to put the small parts together.
17:53Margaret Colombo's only qualification was that she'd played the mandolin.
17:58He looked at my hands, and I had the long fingers.
18:02And believe it or not, when I went there, there were three others besides me, and I was the fourth
18:06one went in there.
18:07And they all had long fingers. Yeah. He knew that's what he wanted. He wanted the fingers. Yeah.
18:16The work was so easy to pick up that Phil co-workers sometimes swapped jobs just to vary the routine.
18:23When you're sitting in one spot, and you're doing the same job for a couple of hundred sets, that's a
18:31lot of...
18:32And it got boring, and some of them just wasn't cut out for it. Yet I had other girlfriends that
18:38liked it.
18:42The compensation for the relentless tedium was the high wages.
18:46By the mid-twenties, one in five Americans owned a car, a figure that Britain wouldn't equal for another 40
18:52years.
19:00It was a Ford Model 2 with a rumble seat.
19:06That's a kind of a car. Black.
19:09And you take your friends out, and they get blown all apart in the rumble seat.
19:14But, oh, I had a lot of fun with that car.
19:20At the end of the decade, there were already 29 million cars on America's roads, and half of them were
19:27Model Ts.
19:29The affordable car changed where people lived, where they worked, how they shopped, how they spent their leisure.
19:39Not all Americans could achieve this standard of living, but the ones who did became the envy of the rest
19:44of the world.
19:55Other nations hoped the assembly line could do the same trick for their own prosperity.
20:00Italy had only a quarter of a million cars in the 1920s.
20:06But Fiat, in Turin, was one of the first European car firms to copy Ford.
20:19Its large new plant was a wonder of its time, to be admired and recorded.
20:27From the factory's floor, spiral concrete ramps led up to a test track on the roof.
20:32Music
20:47Motorsport
20:54Senator Agnelli and the plant manager and the production manager at the time
21:01were often in America and were on good terms with Ford.
21:07They would try out what they were doing there
21:09and, if it was possible, bring it here.
21:14In the beginning, the assembly line was run by hand,
21:17worked by the men.
21:20Later, they motorized the line with a chain.
21:27As in America, the faster the chain pulled the cars and engines along,
21:31the faster each man had to work.
21:34Giovanni Gobi was a young supervisor.
21:41One day, my boss put a stopwatch in my hand and said,
21:44go and time how long it takes to do that job.
21:50One of the first people I had to time
21:52was a man who could have been my grandfather.
21:56He had the sort of long Chinese-style moustache people had there.
21:59The poor man was working away
22:01and I was a young kid having to time him.
22:03It was awful.
22:04I couldn't do it and ask for a different job.
22:23Britain had more car workers than any other European country.
22:27Ford had had a British factory since 1912.
22:45But there were still only a million cars on British roads by 1929.
22:51Morris, the biggest domestic producer, made a film to promote their plant at Cowley near Oxford.
23:01Hello.
23:02Hello, dear. Had a good day?
23:04Yes, rather.
23:05So, I wish you'd been with me. I've been to Cowley.
23:07You know, where they make Morris cars. It's most awfully interesting.
23:11That doesn't sound frightfully amusing to me.
23:14Aren't all these motorworks very dirty and noisy and rather dull?
23:18Oh, not at all. Frankly, I've had a very good time.
23:24At the pressed steel factory next to Morris, where they made car bodies, ex-coal miner Hayden Evans had a
23:30different view of it all.
23:32My first impression was, what a terrible racket. What a terrible din. Gracious me, how can you possibly stick this?
23:42It's a bang, bang, bang, bang. It sounds from everywhere, you know, beating metal.
23:46Well, it's hard to describe. Very hard to describe. You've got to be in it to appreciate.
23:54And yet, I ended up on the machines that were making the loudest noise in the motorworks.
24:06Giant presses had replaced the hammers of the early British craftsmen at Vulcan.
24:15One day, I was turning these doors over, trip armoured along the door, and I tripped armoured my finger as
24:22long the tip of it off.
24:25And I said to the, there was an inspector near me, I said, I think I dumped something to my
24:30finger.
24:30And I pulled my glove off, which had cotton gloves, and the top of it was all flattened out.
24:36Anyway, I think I had 30 shillings, and I was idle 10 days, and I went back to work.
24:47Morris workers didn't yet have a moving line. Instead, they still moved the cars on themselves.
24:53Unlike Americans, who were paid a flat rate per hour, the British had no guaranteed income.
24:59They earned on a piecework basis. If they fell behind, they lost pay. If they got ahead, it meant a
25:05bonus.
25:11The harder you work, the more money you get. And I was fit and strong, and willing. And I wanted
25:18to get there where the harder I worked, the more I'd have.
25:22I was only there, I only wanted like other people. I was only there for one purpose, to get the
25:28money.
25:30Car industry pay packets were envied by other workers. As in America, the car towns were islands of prosperity, as
25:37the Depression was starting.
25:39There was houses being built all around Oxford, different estates, Sunnyside Estates, Florence Park Estates, different estates.
25:50And your one incentive was to get enough money to put a down payment on a house.
26:00At a time when the old heavy industries were laying workers off, more assembly line factories opened in the south
26:06-east of England.
26:08As companies saw the benefits of mass production, more men and women worked in the new way.
26:14The system was applied to batteries, vacuum cleaners, and biscuits.
26:21There's a precision about this process that is utterly fascinating. And as one sees the orderly rows of biscuits to
26:27be, moving steadily towards the ovens, one cannot help marvelling at the ingenuity of it all.
26:32Approximately a mile of biscuits, 20 deep, passes through one oven in a day.
26:38Occasionally, the machine would be just shut off. You know, so we weren't too pressurised.
26:45Or someone had to leave to, you know, to get the toilet or anything. But on the whole, we kept
26:51going.
26:53We'd used both hands.
26:55Whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. It's quick. You can do really very, very quickly.
27:04At Reading, Huntley and Palmer's built their own equivalent of the River Rouge.
27:09Flour, butter and sugar poured in at one end.
27:15From the other streamed, assorted biscuits.
27:193,000 worked there.
27:23It wasn't the same every day.
27:27Sometimes, as I say, it would be almonds.
27:29Sometimes just cherries.
27:31Sometimes it would be cherry and angelica.
27:35You see? It did vary.
27:40Employers tried to keep unions out.
27:42Workers had to accept insecurity and sudden stoppages.
27:47The foreman himself would come round and tell us that no more work on Saturday.
27:54We would be closed, shut out.
27:56And sometimes it would be a Saturday morning and a Monday all day.
28:00Which we didn't care for because money-wise that made us very short.
28:08The buying power of British wages was only a fifth as high as in America.
28:12The best paid still went to work on foot or by bicycle.
28:18Only the middle class could afford to buy the cars that were being produced.
28:23Today, woman uses the family car to take the children to school or to drive round to the shops.
28:29The car helps her to get through her daily routine quicker, leaving more time for exercise and enjoyment.
28:35It puts the country swimming pool within her reach or takes her out to a golf course or tennis club
28:40in the afternoon.
28:42And now let's look at some of the additional accessories you can obtain for your Ford car.
28:47A combined sun visor and vanity mirror, so handy either for powdering your nose or keeping it from getting sunburnt.
28:55No need to disturb your handbag or exasperate your husband by using the car mirror.
29:01I have been keeping my most precious car possession to the last.
29:05Here it is.
29:07A radio set with which to while away long waits in traffic jams or to relieve the monotony of a
29:13long drive.
29:22Though British employers didn't share the American boss's belief that paying high wages led to general growth,
29:27the consumer society was starting to cross the Atlantic.
29:33This is the home of the radio gramophone.
29:37Hundreds of cabinets slowly moving on to completion.
29:42All components of the radio set are distributed by conveyors.
29:48We will just take a peep into the recording studio where Jack Hilton and his band are rehearsing.
29:57How's that for balance, George?
29:59It's not too bad.
30:01I think we ought to have the violins up a bit.
30:02They're a little bit weak, you know.
30:04A bit narrow.
30:04A little more violins.
30:11Now, two lines of girls, I used to supply them with all the bits they needed.
30:17The shatters, the transformers, and the valves, and the wire.
30:27When the girls finished the wireless sets, I used to check them over, inspect them.
30:32I used to plug them in, and leave them plugged in for 24 hours.
30:36That was called the soak test.
30:38Now, sometimes they blew up, or the fuse went, or they caught fire.
30:42And some of them came through, okay, and then I stamped them up,
30:46and they went into the packing department, put into a cabinet, and then packed and sent out.
30:53They could never understand why it was called a wireless,
30:56because when you looked in the back of it, there was millions of wires all over there.
30:58I said, how can you call that a wireless?
31:01And there's all these wires in there, and you say, well,
31:03it's the fact that there's no wire between the chat you're here talking and this set, you know.
31:08It's completely, it comes over the air.
31:13I get blue when I hear the wheeze of the choo-choo.
31:17Wow.
31:18I want you to go too with me on the choo-choo.
31:21Wow.
31:21The day's here, so get dear, see what I have to say.
31:25Wow.
31:25Get your stuff and pack up, cause we're going away.
31:29Wow.
31:29The sun shines, my heart finds for those lasses and caves.
31:32Most streets now had electricity, and the products of the assembly line began to fill British homes.
31:37Let's go with your troubles and blues.
31:39Though new appliances didn't reach the depressed areas,
31:42car companies like to claim the engine of mass production was now pulling the whole economy forward.
31:48And because we make a motor for a Surrey man to drive,
31:51there are cotton hands in Rochdale who will keep their hopes alive.
31:56And because we make a tractor for a farmer down in Kent,
31:59there are jobs up there in Durham, and there's money to be spent.
32:04There are women buying dresses.
32:06There are children being fed.
32:07There are mothers who can manage.
32:10There are lovers who can wed.
32:12There are hopes to be replenished.
32:14There are dreams to be restored.
32:16There are lives to reach fulfillment through the making of your Ford.
32:23But while its supporters claimed so much for it,
32:27the Ford system had also become a powerful symbol for much that seemed wrong with 20th century life.
32:36In his novel Brave New World, published in 1932,
32:40Aldous Huxley portrayed a brutal, standardized, emotionless society dominated by mass production,
32:46in which Henry Ford was God.
32:51The same year, French cinemas were showing Give Us Our Freedom, set in a gramophone factory.
33:03It satirized the effect of the line.
33:06Tyrannical managers watched over timid workers in prison uniforms.
33:30In the American film Modern Times, originally called The Masses,
33:35Charlie Chaplin got enmeshed in the machinery of the giant factory where he worked.
33:39As efficiency experts increased the speed, he went berserk, seized by the jerking motions of his job.
33:58The whole system of mass production came under increasing attack from the left.
34:03When the Marxist artist Diego Rivera painted a mural of the River Rouge plant
34:07for a new Detroit art gallery, he showed sullen, angry workers in the clamor and din of huge machines.
34:17Paul Botin was one of the faces in the picture.
34:21He managed to capture some of my physical characteristics.
34:28My family says my nose has never been that long, but I don't know, maybe it is.
34:34The machines are perfect designs, perfect designs.
34:39And in the faces of the workers, he wanted his models to recognize themselves, to see some part of themselves.
34:51The strength that was shown on the faces of the workers seemed intimidating to some people.
34:59Because if they came off the wall with their strong muscles and their muscular brows, they may prove dangerous.
35:11Some Detroit industrialists saw the mural as left-wing propaganda and wanted it whitewashed over.
35:20And in every country that now made cars on the assembly line, workers began to give voice to their anger.
35:26You had become an animal, worse than a plain chunk of meat.
35:31You felt a complete frustration and isolation.
35:41We had a certain number of parts to assemble each hour. You had to do it.
35:45No sooner did you finish one part than another one arrived. No stopping allowed.
35:54The worker was just like a machine. With the machine, you push a button and it works non-stop.
35:59The worker just had to keep up.
36:05The whole place was laid out to get the greatest number of cars out in the shortest possible time.
36:13Irrespective of what that meant as far as the worker was concerned.
36:18The worker was really part of the machinery. It wasn't in fact a robot.
36:25Eddie Fro worked at Ford in Britain.
36:28In the 1930s, the level of frustration grew.
36:31British car workers also had no unions and could be laid off if sales fell or new plant was being
36:36installed.
36:38Agitation often came from those who'd known unions in other industries.
36:42Like the young man who'd come by motorbike from the South Wales coal field, Hayden Evans.
36:49All these unskilled jobs in the pressed steel were all treated equal.
36:54And they had the same conditions, the same troubles, the same grievances.
36:59So you are the united people with no representation, nobody to answer for them.
37:07Right. We'll have a union.
37:12After a strike, pressed steel finally recognised the union and agreed higher wages.
37:17It was a breakthrough for British car workers.
37:26At the Renault factory, the spark that ignited their revolt came when the management decided to speed up production.
37:40At one time, we were assembling a hundred parts an hour.
37:43Then the management decided to up the pace, and we had to do 110, then 120.
37:51Inevitably, things snapped. We'd had enough. We weren't machines.
38:00At a time of political turmoil in France, the workers evicted the managers, occupied the plant, and declared a takeover.
38:09Food was sent to them as they camped in the offices.
38:12All over France, other workers did the same as those at Renault.
38:19Men occupied the factories, and the women went there every day. Not at night, though.
38:24We were pretty organised. We played cards, we danced, we managed to have some fun. It wasn't all bad.
38:35The Renault workers had discovered their collective power.
38:43It seemed a glorious interlude of defiance against the line.
38:48After several weeks, the management capitulated.
39:00We were slapping each other on the back, saying,
39:03That's it. We've done it.
39:10French workers won higher wages, a 40-hour week, and an annual holiday for the first time.
39:19It's hard to believe, but out of 120 of us, there was only one who'd ever been on holiday.
39:24We packed our bags and went off to look at the sea.
39:28I was from Brittany, and lived 30 kilometres from the sea, but I'd never seen it.
39:32It was quite a sight, seeing grown people playing like children.
39:42Though many of their gains proved temporary,
39:45French workers had shown how it was possible to stop the assembly lines.
39:55Under the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, any challenge was impossible.
40:00In Italy, Fiat was able to cut wages and increase hours in the 1930s, because unions were illegal.
40:07For Felice Gentile, life was increasingly regimented.
40:16On the job we'd work, how we'd work. You couldn't go for a smoke.
40:24Even when a man went to the toilet, they'd check to see if he was genuine or just wanted to
40:28slip off work for a chat.
40:32And if he did stop to chat and a guard came by, or the manager, and caught him there in
40:36the toilet, he'd be fired.
40:41There was nothing you could do about it.
40:49Workers were called out to welcome their leader to Turin.
40:55Motor engineering and design represented national prestige and dynamism.
41:00And Mussolini took a close interest in what the assembly lines could do for fascism.
41:09Italians were offered a national system of workers' clubs and recreational facilities, instead of unions and conflict.
41:17The communal benefits were meant to substitute for the larger individual pay packets workers had heard about from emigrants to
41:24America.
41:32Even in the Communist Soviet Union, now attempting a rapid industrialization, engineers studied the arch-capitalist Henry Ford's methods to
41:40help get the output Stalin's planners demanded.
41:44Tractors and trucks were needed to build socialism, not cars.
41:51But the new factories that rolled them out in ever-increasing numbers were planned on Detroit lines, with advice from
41:57Ford engineers.
42:06In America itself, the new consumer society had begun to turn sour after the Great Depression put nearly 14 million
42:13out of work.
42:16At first, the car companies managed to keep going, and unemployed men from all over the country converged on Detroit,
42:23hoping they could still find work there.
42:26Thousands waited outside the River Rouge plant.
42:30Paul Botin, already laid off once, waited along with the rest to get his old job back.
42:37People stayed and stayed and stayed in desperation.
42:40And when you looked into their eyes, you thought maybe that's what you look like.
42:47And you saw in the eyes of the others despair.
42:51You thought maybe you look like that to them.
42:55Even those who counted themselves lucky still to be in work, saw their conditions worsen.
43:00The line was run faster.
43:02Workers were put on short time, and rates of pay were cut.
43:10The superintendent called us to the desk, one at a time, and told us we were working for 50 cents
43:17an hour.
43:18No matter what you were making, if you were making a dollar an hour, you went down to 50 cents
43:23an hour.
43:27Things were getting so bad, all the pressures of the line without the high pay to compensate, that workers began
43:33listening to recruiters from the emerging car workers union.
43:37I met a guy by the name of Bill Mackay, and he says, we're going to get a union in
43:43this place.
43:45What the hell is a union, you know?
43:47He said, well, these foremen won't have to be standing over.
43:51But anyway, Bill gave me some literature, and he said, don't let anybody see this.
43:56Put it in your pocket and read it when you get home, you know.
43:58I put it in my shirt pocket.
44:01Later on, I went home that next morning, went to reading about it and everything.
44:05So that's how I got involved in the union.
44:11But with so much unemployment, the union organizers found recruiting hard.
44:16Then in 1932, the River Rouge factory virtually stopped production.
44:21The closures provoked a clash between workers and the company that was to provide a legend for the labor movement.
44:28Out of many meetings and many discussions, it was decided that they would have a hunger march on Ford to
44:35let Ford know that he promises $5 a day and they were, he closed the plant without any explanation whatsoever.
44:43Now we had got permission to march through Detroit.
44:47When we got to this corner here, Miller and Dix, the fireworks started.
44:58Hoses started to pour ice water on top of us, and it was a cordon of police right across Miller
45:03Road proper acting as a barricade.
45:10Right on this spot in here, there were piles of coal, and some of the people got on top of
45:16the piles of coal, and they threw the coals back at the police and at the company people on the
45:25other side of the fence.
45:26The march went on towards Gate 3, and that's where men were shot.
45:40Instead of getting jobs, we got lead, we got bullets, blood.
45:53Four demonstrators were shot dead by police outside the Ford plant.
45:58The Miller Road martyrs, as they were seen, helped draw public attention to the car workers' case.
46:21Washington now backed them too.
46:24There was a new Democrat government, and President Roosevelt's New Deal gave workers the legal right to have unions and
46:30collective bargaining.
46:31In 1937, the auto workers' union felt strong enough to take on other car companies.
46:37After a brief strike, the union was finally recognized by both General Motors and Chrysler.
46:47Only Henry Ford, the original inventor of the assembly line, still held out against the unions.
46:54When a new Ford car was launched in 1937, the promotion and salesmanship were as slick and modern as could
47:00be.
47:01Dealers were summoned to have their enthusiasm whipped up.
47:18Gentlemen, how do you like the 1937 Ford V8?
47:28But while the company boasted how advanced the car was, they still dealt with their workers in the same old
47:34authoritarian way.
47:36The union's tactics grew bolder.
47:40The union had a 1914 model T Ford with a brass radiator on it and had a great big sign
47:49on the top of it.
47:51It said, more modern than Ford's labor policy.
47:55And I was driving it this day.
48:01We got up to the old administration building where Ford had its office.
48:05And I accidentally on purpose stalled it right in the driveway.
48:16In the 27 years after the moving assembly line was first introduced, workers in other companies gradually regained some of
48:23the control they'd lost.
48:25But it wasn't till 1941 that the final showdown came at Ford.
48:30The unions had built their membership to the point where action was possible at last.
48:36After a fight broke out between a foreman and a worker, Jim Sullivan felt the moment had arrived.
48:42So I went back and made my call.
48:45I told Mike Whitman, I said, Mike, it's now or never.
48:50They're ready.
48:51I can take them out.
48:52One of my first acts was to go up and push a red button to stop the line.
48:58I had a foreman named Jim Barbary.
49:00He rushed over to, what the hell do you think you're doing?
49:02So I said, strike, strike, everybody went to hollering, strike, strike, strike.
49:08The world's biggest car plant ground to a halt.
49:13I felt real good.
49:15I said, boy, I really done a job, you know.
49:18I was dancing the jig.
49:20I made history.
49:22I shut down the Ford Motor Company.
49:28After the strike, the union had a legal contract with the company.
49:31From then on, all workers had to belong to the union.
49:35Changes to the speed of the line and work practices were to be jointly negotiated.
49:40The Ford contract, so hard won, became a model for the rest of American industry.
49:53Toward Washington DC in 1941, millions of US citizens are looking anxiously for leadership in the greatest armament program of
50:02their nation's history.
50:05The Second World War put new demands on the assembly lines.
50:09The days when managers dictated the terms were now over, and with labor so scarce, the balance of power in
50:15the factories shifted.
50:17America and its allies needed even greater output, and to secure it they had to speed up the lines even
50:23faster, and win the workers' cooperation.
50:28Britain's huge mass production industry is totally at war.
50:32To mend the factories, every available man and woman who is not under arms is at work.
50:38Never before in Britain's history has production been so high.
50:42They're all in it together.
50:46It was American methods that were still held up as the example to follow.
50:50British trade unionists were taken across the Atlantic to see what Fordism could do when it was aircraft that were
50:56being mass produced.
50:58In one year alone, 96,000 planes were turned out in America, many by the car companies.
51:06There's a whole line of these machines. That's the American idea. Mass production.
51:11And it's just what is needed in wartime too.
51:14It was a wonderful sight.
51:20And here was a finished wing coming to meet its fuselage.
51:24Here was production as I'd heard about it.
51:28And it was also a chance to see the American workers' standard of living that they'd heard about.
51:35It was my last night with the family.
51:38Ellen was getting dinner ready.
51:40A right smart little kitchen she had to work in.
51:43Everything easy to end.
51:44And the living room. What a comfortable place.
51:51In this land of automobiles, people think nothing of living 20 miles away from where they work.
51:59At the end of the war, American workers were still the best paid in the world.
52:04As the first to work on the assembly line, they'd also been the first to come to terms with it.
52:12In other countries, people would still have to live through many of the same battles for control,
52:17before they could agree how to share the profits and reap the full benefits of a consumer society.
52:23What have you learned?
52:32How have you learned?
52:38How have you learned?
52:39What are you learned?
52:47How have you learned?
52:49And how can I bring to the school ?
52:51How can I walk the middle of a country?
52:53Around the body.
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