https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/

Fordism

— after Henry Ford (1863-1947); method of industrial management based on assembly-line methods of production of cheap, uniform commodities in high volume, and winning employee loyalty with good wages, but intolerant of unionism or employee participation.

Henry Ford was born on the family farm near Dearborn, Michigan, but at 19 began part-time work at the nearby Westinghouse Engine Company while tinkering at home in his own machine shop. He soon moved to Detroit and in 1894 made chief engineer at the Detroit electricity plant. Working in his spare time, by 1896 he had completed his first horseless carriage. Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 and claiming "I will build a motor car for the great multitude," Ford produced the first the Model T in October 1908. Over the 19 years following, Ford sold 15,500,000 Model T’s in the US, 1,000,000 more in Canada, and 250,000 in Britain — as many cars as produced by all other producers in the entire world during the same period, all identical in design and all black. Surely more than anyone else responsible for the invention of the modern world, Ford has been recorded as stating: "history is more or less bunk". He was also a pacifist and opposed the First World War.

There were two interrelated aspects of Ford’s revolution that contributed to the transformation wrought by these 17 million motor cars.

Firstly, the assembly-line system in the Ford plant in Highland Park, Michigan, with its constantly moving conveyor belt and minute division of labour which, by 1913, was able to deliver just-on-time parts, subassemblies, and assemblies (themselves built on subsidiary assembly lines) with precise timing, reduced the production time of a complete chassis from 728 minutes to 93 minutes and by 1927 Ford was turning out a Model T every 24 seconds.

Secondly, in 1914, Ford announced that it would henceforth pay workers a minimum wage of $5 a day, more than double the average for the motor industry at that time, and simultaneously reduced the working day from nine hours to eight, operating the plant 24-hours-a-day with a three-shift system.

These moves made Ford a worldwide celebrity, but his motives were sound business sense. Ford workers could aspire to buy a Ford motor car, as the price of a Model T fell from $950 in 1908 to $290 in 1927. Previously, profit had been based on paying wages as low as workers would take and pricing cars as high as the market would bear. Ford, on the other hand, stressed low pricing to capture the widest possible market and then met the price by volume and efficiency. Later on, in resisting further automation of his factory, Henry Ford remarked "Robots don’t buy motor cars".

The $5 a day wage that brought him attention in 1914 brought with it an overbearing paternalism. Further, it was no guarantee for the future. In 1932, with sales as falling a result of the Great Depression, Ford cut wages from $7 to $4 a day, below prevailing industry rate. Ford freely employed company police, labour spies, and violence to prevent unionisation and continued to do so even after other manufacturers had signed contracts with the United Auto Workers, which did not succeed in organising Ford’s factory until 1941.

So "Fordism" refers to this policy of winning the loyalty of workers to profit from a high-wage economy, by producing commodities for the masses as cheaply as possible by the application of assembly line techniques. It was this policy which brought the United States to the position of the dominant capitalist power by the end of World War Two.

The difficulties with Fordism was that while it depended absolutely on the loyalty of the workers it offered no room for innovation or worker participation, and the low price was achieved at the price of mind-numbing uniformity and indifference to market demands: market demand was the result not the driving force of production.

P.S. Ford did not invent the assembly line. The idea of the moving belt originated in the 19th-century meat-packing industry in Cincinnati and Chicago, and the mass production of absolutely uniform components for later assembly, originated in the Colt gun factory. The Waltham Watch Company, invented the "transfer machine", precursor of the industrial conveyor belt, in 1888. The word "automation" was however invented by Ford, in 1940.