Movers and Shakers
At the beginning of the 20th century, work for most Americans was difficult and uncertain and, for many, unsafe. There was no eight-hour day, no sick leave, no minimum wage and no Social Security. Women worked as well as men, toiling in clothing or textile factories or as servants. Labor unions were in their infancy and socialism was an untried idea that many workers believed would ease their lot. Here are some people whose ideas and inventions have shaped the way we work at century’s close.
Henry Ford:
Few people have affected the nature of work as profoundly as Henry Ford, the Michigan farm boy whose Model T was the first mass-produced and relatively affordable automobile.
In 1913, Ford popularized an experimental idea, the moving assembly line, which changed auto production from a longish job by mechanics who worked on a single car until it was finished to a highly efficient process. No longer did workers put together cars as a team. Each employee was responsible for a single task, as auto parts and eventually entire cars moved along from employee to employee, carried by a conveyor belt or rope-pulled line.
This development was enormously influential, increasing employers’ expectations for production volume and even setting the stage for the high-efficiency culture of today’s manufacturing world. The assembly line allowed the unskilled to find steady work in the cities, eventually bringing millions into a relatively prosperous working class. Ford also paid his workers uncommonly well, guaranteeing them the handsome sum of $5 a day. The idea, the auto pioneer said, was to pay the workers enough to enable them to purchase the company’s products.
Once cars were readily available to working people, lives changed dramatically, enabling families to move out of inner cities and even away from trolley lines, and creating a class of jobs that relied on driving.
George Eastman
At a time when most industrial workers were toiling long hours for limited wages and few amenities, the founder of Eastman Kodak Co. wanted his employees to share in his good fortune. George Eastman, who brought picture-taking to ordinary Americans with the invention of the $1 Brownie camera in 1900, pioneered the first profit-sharing plan a dozen years later
A former bank clerk, Eastman grew wealthy by selling the celluloid film he developed and the point-and-shoot photography he helped promote. But he was quick to share his wealth, first by sharing dividends with employees in 1912 and then by philanthropy in Rochester, N.Y., where the company was based.
Until layoffs rocked the company in 1998, going to work for Kodak meant a job for life--in Rochester, it was known as “taking the life sentence.” Eastman was so generous with his employees that even during periods of intense labor activity, Kodak was never unionized.
Rose Schneiderman
A young woman in 1911, Rose Schneiderman of the Ladies Dress and Waist Union gave a stirring speech in New York after a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killed 167 people and brought the plight of the city’s mostly immigrant sweatshop workers into the public eye.
Inspired by the speech, Frances Perkins, who was to become secretary of labor under Franklin Roosevelt, asked Al Smith to appoint a commission to investigate the fire and the working conditions in the clothing factories. Smith, then the majority leader of the state Assembly and soon to be governor, did so. The result was some of the nation’s first safety regulations and the rise of the first labor union to represent mostly women, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
In 1995, the union merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to form UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Workers.
Samuel Gompers
A son of a cigar maker in London, Samuel Gompers came to the United States with his family in 1863. As a young man, Gompers worked in a cigar factory, and joined the cigar makers union.
He campaigned tirelessly to improve working conditions, arguing against child labor and in favor of an eight-hour day for employees, who were then working 16 or even 20 hours at a stretch. Gompers became active in the fledgling American Federation of Labor, eventually becoming its president, and served on the committee investigating the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911.
The next year, Congress passed a bill mandating an eight-hour day for federal employees.
Kermit Johnson and Genora Johnson Dillinger
By the mid-1930s, conditions were grim in the automobile production plants that had drawn tens of thousands of workers to Detroit and its environs in the years after Henry Ford introduced the Model T and the assembly line.
In these late years of the Great Depression, workers at a Chevrolet plant were told sneeringly that they had been hired “from the neck down” only. The company did not provide facilities for washing, and it was so hot inside some plants--sometimes reaching 115 degrees--that workers fainted at their places. Assembly lines were constantly being sped up.
But in 1936, a group of workers led by Kermit Johnson sat down on the job at a Fisher auto body plant in Flint, Mich. His wife, Genora Johnson Dillinger, was outside the factory leading efforts to sneak food to the workers and fend off company goons. Their unplanned strike inspired workers to sit down at other plants.
By the time it was over, the fledgling United Auto Workers union had developed a might that few had anticipated. The new power of unions was to shape the relationship between labor and management for the next 40 years.
George E. Merrick
In 1921, developer George E. Merrick built Coral Gables outside of Miami, just in time for the automobile to make commuting possible for middle- and upper-middle class families with wage earners who worked in the city. Coral Gables was a model of suburbia as a non-urban place, with winding, irregular streets, detached homes and plenty of green space.
To a degree, it was a commercial version of utopian socialist communities that had sprung up in Britain and parts of the United States. Coral Gables and its descendants, which include Radburn, N.J., and even the communities of the San Fernando Valley, boomed as the century grew longer, benefiting from a combination of the automobile, deductible mortgage interest, the G.I. bill--which provided low-cost loans to returning veterans from World War II--and, finally, federal funding for the construction of freeways. These communities changed the nature of work first by separating work from home and creating the culture of commuting.
Then toward the end of the century, in a reaction against endless commutes and clogged freeways, telecommuting was born, placing work not only near the home but in it.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
From Social Security and the minimum wage to tax deductions for companies that provide health insurance, Roosevelt shaped the intersection of life and work like no other president.
With Social Security, working-class Americans could afford to retire, instead of working until they fell ill or died. Before Roosevelt, very few Americans could afford to retire. Those who could no longer work depended on their families for assistance, or lived in charity houses.
Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935. At that time, in the depths of the Depression, 25% of the work force was out of a job, and many older people had no one to help support them. Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in an era of legal protections for organized labor, as well as the first-ever federally mandated minimum wage.
Paul Galvin
The proprietor of Galvin Manufacturing Corp. changed his company’s name to Motorola in 1930 and marketed the first practical and affordable radio for use in automobiles. In 1956, the year that company founder Paul Galvin handed the reins to his son, Robert Galvin, Motorola marketed the first pager. Initially sold primarily to doctors, pagers soon became ubiquitous in American business, ensuring that no one--whether chief executive or hourly worker--could escape a call from the office.
Tom Watson Jr.
The son of IBM founder Thomas Watson moved the company’s headquarters to Armonk, N.Y., in 1964. The Westchester County location, 30 miles north of IBM’s former home on Madison Avenue in New York City, allowed Watson to be closer to his family in Greenwich, Conn., and set the stage for the growing suburbs to be places where people could work as well as live.
After IBM’s dramatic move, other companies followed suit. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, developers such as Ray Watson, who conceived and built the community of Irvine, constructed suburbs with the explicit idea of putting jobs as well as houses there. Such communities helped spur the entry of women into the job market by providing employment near their homes and their children’s schools.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
Pundits admired the inventors of the personal computer, but sneered when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs said that their desktop creations would revolutionize work, home and information. Then it happened. Personal computers got their start with the work the two men did in a Silicon Valley garage in the 1970s. Their first creation, the Apple, went on the market in 1976. The next year, the second version, the Apple II, sold 300,000 units. IBM came out with a competitor in 1981, and the race was on.
The first computers were used mostly for games, writing, mathematics and engineering. Soon architects were designing on computers, and secretaries had given up their Selectrics for PCs. Some workers began to augment their limited, slow-moving, glorified word processors with modems, sending files at excruciatingly slow rates over phone lines.
Bit by bit, communication speeded up, and today, most white- and pink-collar workers have access not only to a PC, but also to the Internet and electronic mail. Today, Jobs remains in the computer business, having recently guided Apple to a resurgence with its iMac computers. Wozniak has become a teacher.
Tim Berners-Lee
If the assembly line forever changed work at the beginning of the century, surely the World Wide Web and the Internet have altered human labor at its end.
The Internet is a creation of many scientists, growing out of the vision of a behavioral scientist, J.C.R. Licklider, in the early 1960s. Licklider’s dream was to connect computers together into a “galactic network” that would help people find and analyze data.
The network had been growing steadily for years, but it was mostly text-based and used by scientists and academics. In 1972, the invention of electronic mail linked computer users, still mostly academics, who could write to one another on computers and then send the letters in packets of data to others on the network.
But it was not until the arrival of Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, that the graphical-based network known as the World Wide Web was born. Berners-Lee created a series of links as a way to keep track of people, projects and computers in the lab where he worked.
Over time, his program formed the basis of a new communications medium, enabling people to point, click and download information from the Internet without entering cumbersome text or numerical commands.
