Assembly Line Revolution (1920)

Henry Ford's moving assembly line at Highland Park began producing Model Ts in 1913. By 1920 the idea had escaped the automobile. Appliances, radios, processed food, and a great deal of light manufacturing were being broken into short, repeated motions paced by a conveyor or by a time-study man's stopwatch. The 1920s are when mass production stopped being one company's experiment and became the default picture of modern work.

The promise was a wage high enough to buy the product. The cost was a job that consisted of one motion, performed at a speed the worker did not choose.

The line as a job design

Before the moving line, assemblers at Ford walked from chassis to chassis, and each skilled fitter did a long stretch of the build. The conveyor brought the work to a stationary person and gave that person a task short enough to learn in hours. Chassis assembly time fell from more than twelve hours to about ninety minutes. The Model T's price fell with it. Ford's five-dollar day, announced in 1914, was partly a way to stop people quitting work that many of them hated.

Frederick Winslow Taylor's time studies supplied the vocabulary. Industrial engineers filmed motions, cut out the ones they called wasted, and wrote a standard. The person on the line was no longer the author of the method. A separate profession, the time-study engineer, owned the method and revised it. Supervision thickened: foremen, inspectors, and schedulers multiplied because the system only worked if every station kept the pace.

Who stood where

The best-paid new jobs were off the line. Toolmakers, die setters, electricians, and millwrights kept the machines capable of the pace. Production planners and cost accountants translated the line into paper. On the line itself, the work was open to people without a craft apprenticeship, including large numbers of immigrants and, increasingly, Black workers moving during the Great Migration, though plants sorted people by race and gender into the hotter, dirtier, or simply separate departments.

Craft assemblers lost the center of manufacturing. A carriage maker who could build a vehicle from drawings had no slot on a line that wanted forty-five seconds of the same bolt. Some became the toolmakers. Many left the trade. The social status of 'skilled worker' shifted from the person who finished the object to the person who set up the machine that finished it.

The life around the wage

Mass production pulled people into industrial suburbs and second shifts. It also created the consumer jobs that sold what the line made: auto dealers, appliance salesmen, installment collectors, and the advertising writers who named the desire. A factory wage spent on a car created a dealership job, which is a reminder that employment lost in one place can reappear as employment in selling the result.

The line remains the template for arguments about dignity at work. Later reforms, from union contracts to job enrichment to the robotic cell, are all responses to a design that treated the worker as a station. When people say a job has been turned into an assembly line, they are talking about 1913, whether they know the year or not.

Assembly Line Revolution

The line as a job design

Who stood where

The life around the wage

Work that grew

Work that lost its place

Companies of this chapter

Largest

New at the time