rigorousintuition.ca

What started out as a team of 50 "Investigators" eventually morphed into a team of 200 people who probed every aspect of their employees lives. And I mean every aspect.

Investigators would show up unannounced at your home, just to make sure it was being kept clean. They'd ask questions that were less appropriate of a car company, than they were for the modern-day CIA. They'd query you about your spending habits, your alcohol consumption, even your marital relationships. They'd ask what you were buying, and they'd check on your children to make sure they were in school. 1

Women weren't eligible, unless they were single and had to support children. Men weren't eligible unless the only work their wives did was in the home.

They were Henry Ford's personal morality enforcers, making sure that everyone who took one of his paychecks lived up to his standards. Those standards included patriotism and assimilation, especially when it came to language. This wasn't just a wanton disregard for other cultures (though that wasn't not a part of it), but rather a safety issue. In a time of massive amounts of immigration from Europe, all Ford workers had to speak English. On the factory floor, a simple miscommunication could get someone killed.

elfismiles » Wed Jun 18, 2014 5:50 am wrote:Well, considering I tend to associate racism and fascism ... sounds about right.

You are familiar with Ford's anti-Semitic history, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#The_coming_of_World_War_II_and_Ford.27s_mental_collapse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#The_Dearborn_Independent_and_anti-Semitism

When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living – which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education – was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s – a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare provision reduced anxiety and misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple, repetitive tasks. Mid-century capitalism gave everything needed for survival, but no opportunities for life; it was a system based on force-feeding survival to saturation point.

Of course, not all workers under Fordism actually had stable jobs or security – but this was the core model of work, around which the larger system was arranged. There were really three deals in this phase, with the B-worker deal – boredom for security – being the most exemplary of the Fordism-boredom conjuncture. Today, the B-worker deal has largely been eliminated, leaving a gulf between the A- and C-workers (the consumer society insiders, and the autonomy and insecurity of the most marginal).