The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire. By Elizabeth D. Esch (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018) 257 pp. $85.00 cloth $29.95 paper and e-book

Abstract

The Ford Motor Company was not only a leader in the adaptation of assembly-line technologies to auto production; it was also unusual in several dimensions of its approach to labor relations. Esch examines the interplay of Ford’s technological practices and its broader labor policies, giving particular attention to Ford’s approach to race, ethnicity, and immigrant status in forming its workforce. Although she provides a thorough discussion of Ford’s plants in Detroit, a major goal of this volume is to extend the Ford story by examining the company’s labor practices outside the United States, especially on its rubber plantations in Brazil and in its production facilities in South Africa.Esch makes much use of quantitative studies of Ford by economic historians, as well as archival material. Her discussion repeatedly calls back to Gramsci’s writing on Ford and on the interplay between technology, culture, and politics in getting workers to produce under Ford’s intense system.1Chapters 1, 2, and 3, which focus on Ford’s activities in the United States, are the most thoroughly developed. Esch begins with an examination of Ford’s use of immigrant workers, particularly at the Highland Park plant. Ford’s establishment of the $5.00 day wage, in part to stymie organizing efforts, was tied to a program of “Americanization” through Ford’s Sociological Department and English School. Esch’s discussion of this program is thorough and vivid, including a description of the graduation ceremonies at the English School in which immigrant workers emerged from an actual “melting pot” waving American flags.2As production moved from Highland Park to Rouge, Ford began to draw from different labor supplies, and the company’s methods of extracting effort also changed. Rather than focusing on “making [American] men” out of an immigrant workforce, this new approach established order through both the pace of the assembly line and the harsh, sometimes arbitrary, discipline meted out by supervisors. Esch emphasizes that the role of the foreman as a driver of labor was a constant in Ford’s modern production methods, and she connects this system of labor control to Ford’s expressions of support for emerging Fascist movements.Esch highlights the role of the “color line” in her extended discussion of the use of African-American labor at Rouge. She aptly applies the work of Whatley, Wright, and their co-authors in creating and analyzing data sets based on personnel records from Ford’s Detroit plants in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.3 The main lesson is that Ford was effective in exploiting the limited outside options of African-American workers by concentrating them in difficult and dangerous jobs that white workers would not tolerate for long, particularly in the foundry.Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Ford’s rubber production facilities in the Amazon and auto plants in South Africa. In Brazil, Ford applied aspects of both its “making men” and foreman-driven methods of extracting effort at rubber-production facilities at Fordlandia and Belterra. In neither case was Ford able to adapt its established methods to this new context. Esch’s discussion of South Africa focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, well before the formal establishment of apartheid. She notes that “company records on Ford in South Africa are scarcely available” for this period (152). She instead highlights analysis and recommendations in the 1932 Carnegie Commission Report about the conditions of the white poor in South Africa. The Carnegie Report emphasized themes similar to those characterizing labor relations at Highland Park—the reform of the white poor through factory discipline and mass consumerism. Although these ideas apparently influenced government and business leaders in pre-apartheid South Africa, concrete evidence about Ford’s “specific impact” is, as Esch admits, “fragmentary” (181).In a substantive concluding chapter, Esch takes a look at the operation of new Ford facilities around the globe and the firm’s continuing practice of identifying vulnerable groups of workers that might be susceptible to intense production methods. Her discussion of the use of migrants from the countryside in urban auto plants in China, in particular, draws interesting and surprising parallels to Ford’s use of migrant black workers at Rouge.Esch’s discussion of Ford’s practices outside the United States is less detailed than her discussion of Detroit, but she provides a useful starting point for examining Ford’s adaptation of its labor practices to differing national contexts. Historians and historically minded social scientists will find this book to be an accessible, informative, and engaging contribution to the literature about Ford.