No less a business giant than Henry Ford was for the $15 movement (inflation adjusted) Photo Courtesy PBS.
While I’m personally all for a $15 minimum wage (economic theory be damned), I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it. But just now, I was chaining away, mentally speaking, and came upon an interesting comparison.
The initial trigger happened this morning. I had dropped off my younger daughter at school and swung by the local Albertson’s for vital purchases (bananas, strawberries, and Ovaltine, which has gone from a red-dominant (angry Ovaltine) to a blue-themed (tranquil Ovaltine) design) and noted on a window adjacent to the automatic doors a help-wanted sign, for cashiers (courtesy staff? some pleasant acronym). $9 an hour.
I have seen this sign before and had shuddered at it.
This evening, I was pondering my own questionable earning status when the sign re-boarded my drifting mind. I make more than $9 an hour, thank God.
And I thought: how does anybody get by on $9 an hour — that’s, what, $72 a day?
And then the idea of $5 a day struck me. I’m from Dearborn, Michigan, so things related to Ford have an odd sway.
$5 a day (I’m not following Associated Press style, here, for the record. Five dollars a day would be how you’d start a sentence in this case) is what Henry Ford, apparently unbidden, decided to pay even his least-skilled worker – the piston-counters, the engine-crankers, the coal-polishers, the tire taste-testers, all of them – five bucks a day, minimum.
Then I thought about the U.S. Department of Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Inflation Calculator and wonderered a) when it was that Henry Ford made that unbidden gesture and b) what $5 was worth, inflation-adjusted, back then.
This is unfortunately file art. I don’t typically have such sums at my disposal.
For a), a Google search of “Henry Ford $5 Day” yielded 1914; for b), the inflation calculator came back with $5 back then equating to $119.07 today.
Per an eight-hour day, that’s $14.88. Which is damn near $15.
And what I also learned, courtesy of The Henry Ford, (that incomparable, eclectic, museum/village in my hometown (I worked there in high school — a “Cart Guy” in period clothing, selling fruit/candy from a wooden deal like a Mormon might have shoved along his westward march)): Ford workers did nine-hour days back until that very moment, at which Henry also trimmed the workday to eight hours.
So no less a capitalist than Henry Ford was all for $15 an hour, too. #fightfor15 indeed.
