FORD FOUNDRY.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 January 1922, Page 5

FORD FOUNDRY.

PRODIGIOUS SIZE. Some remarkable figures to hand from America afford further ilustration that rate of wages is by no means the same thing as wages cost (states a London paper). America has solved the problem of producing cheaply with high-rate wages, and the Ford establishment is the most striking illustration of a general case. Wages have been cut recently in America, but,' as is so often overlooked, the rates, after the cut, are much higher than ours. Ford has established a new foundry of prodigious size —the space is sixteen acres—capahh of producing castings for an output per day of 5000 motor cars and 2000 tractors, or over 20.000,000 cars and tractors a year! Ido not know how many tractors Ford sold last year, but the number of motor cars sold was 1.027,000, as compared with 308,000 in 1915, and with 1695 only in 1905. In America the car is now sold for less than pre-war price, but Ford is paying much higher’ wages than in 1913. It must be obvious that such a result cannot be achieved without organisation of a very advanced character. In this country the term “cost of production” is so commonly used as a synonym for “rate of wages” that great suspicion justly attaches to the expression. I The Ford organisation is such that the great new foundry employs a relatively small number of skilled men. Yet while the number is relatively small, it is actually great, and it is supplemented by an army of “unskilled” men. The Ford army of workers is in employment just because the cost output per unit is small, r.nd because Ford has cieated a great demand by his cheapness. It is a cheapness, or abundance, produced by economic methods. Cheap labor is incapable of such results.