"A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business." -Henry Ford
8-hour workdays and 40-hour work weeks with weekends off are the standard working hours today that many employees put in today, though many work overtime and extra hours for extra money for their households and families. However, this is a relatively new concept...not until the 1900’s did companies have this set up for their employees. It used to be that employees worked as much as 100 hours a week without overtime pay, holidays, and days off.
Starting from school age, we are put into a routine with school of an 8-hour school day that gets us accustomed to working eight set hours a day as adults. The primary reason behind this for school is to use the natural body patterns so we can be our most productive. Also, working for a long time without adequate breaks or mealtimes will reduce productivity and increase stress.
Henry Ford helped change that.
On September 25th, 1926, Henry Ford made a groundbreaking change with the Ford Motor Company by being one of the first significant companies to change his work policy to 40-hour weeks with five working days, with no change in wages. Ford also announced a payment of 5 dollars for every 8-hour workday, when the wage had been less than half of that before that. More than doubling employee salary shocked the other companies, but Ford was a smart man and it made employee production boom, as well as instilling a sense of company pride in the Ford Company employees and the products they produced.
Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s son and the eventual president of the company said that “every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. The Ford Company always has sought to promote an ideal home life for its employees. We believe that in order to live properly, every man should have more time to spend with his family."
Wow.
You can’t help but think of Henry Ford’s philosophies with Labor Day coming up. Henry Ford had single-handedly helped change the Industrial Revolution by fair wages and shorter working weeks, long before it was put into law. It's important to note that many other men and women rallied for the same thing and had to fight for it. Henry Ford was a prominent business owner that helped enforce it.
Eventually, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 for all workers to see limits on working hours.
Henry Ford was an early riser in terms of the five-day work week, along with the American Federation of Labor, that fought for it to be adopted more widely. Ford deserves credit for 8 hour a day work shifts, although he wasn’t the first, he was definitely the most prominent.
We are proud to be Wisconsin’s oldest Ford dealership and to stand behind Henry Ford, the guy who helped put the Labor Day movement and workdays into motion.