UNIV 3539 Blog

On The Line deals with Henry Ford and his concept of mass production. This unit talks about his idea of an assembly line so that more and more cars could be made in a faster amount of time. His employees began feeling the amount of stress the assembly lines brought to their lives. With the expectation of needing more and more cars made, the workers began having to work harder and longer hours. In a sense, the workers became apart of the machine itself. Ford and other employers began to play their workers more money in order to keep them with their company and they large work load. The production techniques used to make cars, radios, biscuits, and other comsumer products could also be used to produce armaments on an unprecedented scale. This capacity to produce arms increased the power gap between industrialized and nonindustrialized nations. In 1941, as a result of a strike at the Rouge plant, which was when workers were given the right to unionize and bargain collectively with management, the Ford Motor Company did the same and entered into a contract with the United Auto Workers that modeled the American industry for the future. This newly formed American industry was a good thing when the United States went into WWII because the most productive workers and modern assembly line in the task of entering the war.