The Making of Corporate Empire
Book Review
Slaughter, Jane
http://solidarity-us.org/atc/197/color-line-assembly-line/
Date Written: 2018-11-01
Publisher: Against the Current
Year Published: 2018
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX23445
Review of a book covering Henry Ford's "ethos of the assembly line" and how his racist views shaped it in different places.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
The Color Line and the Assembly Line:
Managing Race in the Ford Empire
By Elizabeth D. Esch
University of California Press, 2018, 257 pages, $29.95 paperback.
As Esch shows, Henry Ford always said that he was as much about "making men" as about making cars. As he spread the assembly line around the world, she argues, his social engineering techniques "led governments, social scientists, intellectuals, financiers, and nationalists globally to seek out the ideas associated with Ford as well as the actual investment."
Ford’s social engineering was not uniform from country to country. It always had a racist or pro-nativist component: "elites in these societies shared in common an overarching belief in 'white' as the racial designation of civility, progress, modernity, and order."
But his managers applied their white supremacist ideas flexibly, depending on the local scene. Although the "ethos of the assembly line" would seem to see all workers as interchangeable, it was actually used in very different ways to "draw, redraw, and harden the color line."
Esch looks at three case studies of the interaction of the color line with the assembly line.
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