When Henry Ford published My Life and Work a century ago in 1923, it was, like Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, an instant bestseller, shifting 80,000 copies in the Soviet Union alone by 1930. Ford was famous for two things. First, the assembly line, bringing the entire production process under one roof in the gargantuan River Rouge complex in Michigan. The other was the Model T. Earning the famous “five dollar a day” wage, workers at the plant would, at least in theory, be able to purchase the product they were making.
Soon after the book’s publication, Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld did Ford the honour of turning his name into an “ism”. The German economist saw Fordism as not just about mass production plus mass consumption, but a rewriting of the social contract on the back of a single company’s balance sheet. By tying worker wages to productivity gains, Fordism offered a new basis for social solidarity in the fusion of worker, boss and machine.
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