Ford sent investigators into workers’ homes to decide who deserved a raise.
In January 1914, Henry Ford announced that workers at his Highland Park plant would receive five dollars a day, roughly double the prevailing wage for unskilled industrial labor in Detroit.1 The announcement drew thousands of job seekers to the factory gates. The Highland Park fire department turned hoses on the crowd to disperse them.
The five dollars was not a wage. Ford called it a profit-sharing plan, and eligibility depended on how a worker lived outside the factory. To administer the program, John R. Lee, Ford's head of personnel, created the Sociological Department in 1914.2 Lee hired a staff of investigators and sent them into workers' homes.
The investigators documented living conditions, checked bank deposits, inspected the cleanliness of bedrooms, monitored children's school attendance, and recorded whether a worker's wife was employed outside the home. Workers who failed the inspection lost their share of the profits for thirty days. If they did not improve within six months, they were dismissed.3
In 1915, Ford asked the Reverend Samuel S. Marquis, his personal pastor, to take charge of the department.4 Under Marquis, the staff of investigators grew to roughly two hundred. Marquis described the department's mission in moral terms, framing it as an effort to help workers live decent lives.
The program achieved its business objective. Before the five-dollar day, annual worker turnover at Highland Park had reached 370 percent.1 After the announcement, turnover dropped sharply, and productivity rose. Ford framed these results as evidence that surveillance and moral guidance made workers more reliable.
Marquis resigned in 1921. In his 1923 book Henry Ford: An Interpretation, he wrote that the executives who had once valued justice and humanity above profits were gone.5 The Sociological Department continued in reduced form until the early 1940s. The profit-sharing plan that justified its existence had collapsed by 1921.3