3/12/18
Big picture:
- high demand for cars before
1929 means more and more jobs
- until the market is saturated
and add to that people having less money to spend
- the market for cars collapses
- many workers lose their jobs
the $5 day was a solution to extremely high worker turnover
it was understood as a form of profit sharing but was
threatening to other industries
once workers got used to the new system, they began to complain
complaints about monotony and speedup then built up again in the
late 1920s
two issues:
- the assembly line gave factory
managers more control over workers--workers felt like slaves
to the machines
- technological
unemployment--fewer workers are needed to make the same
number of products
- does demand go up or are new
jobs created?
- different jobs are created
that may require more education
- so far when people have
worried about technological unemployment, the economy has
expanded in other ways eventually and the problem has gone
away
- some people think that isn't
going to happen this time (in the present)
technological unemployment:
- fewer workers could make a
given number of cars
- this was fine as well as the
demand for cars kept going up
- and people had money to buy
new products
- but eventually supply exceeded
demand
a new level of mass production meant many jobs of
all sorts were being replaced by machines
Ford had to speed up the assembly line to compete because the
company had high fixed costs
workers developed the technique of a sit down strike, occupying
the factory
won the right to unionize
Diego Rivera murals
Johnny Cash, One Piece
at a Time