The business world has never attempted to solve the problem of these men. Waste from the great machine, they are thrown carelessly out, unable because of that tell-tale cough to get another job, left to shift for themselves in a world which thinks it does not need them.
Ford established a "heat-treating department" especially for them. When the surgeons discover a case of incipient tuberculosis in the Ford factory, they transfer the man to this department, where the air, filtered, dried and heated, is scientifically better for their disease than the mountain climate of Denver. Here the men are given light jobs which they can handle, and paid their regular salaries until they are cured and able to return to their former places in the shops.
"It's better for everybody when a man stays at work, instead of laying off," Ford says. "I don't care what's wrong with him, whether he's a misfit in his department, or stupid, or sick. There's always some way to keep him doing useful work. And as long as he is doing that it's better for the man and for the company, and for the world.
"And yet there are men in business to-day who install systems to prevent the waste of a piece of paper or a stamp, and let the human labor in their plants go to waste wholesale. Yes, and they sat up and said I was a sentimental idiot when I put in my system of taking care of the men in my place. They said it would not pay. Well, let them look over the books of the Ford factory and see how it paid--how it paid all of us."
Five months after Ford's new plans had gone into effect his welfare workers made a second survey.
Eleven hundred men had moved to better homes. Bank deposits had increased 205 per cent. Twice as many men owned their own homes. More than two million dollars' worth of Detroit real estate had passed into the hands of Ford employees, who were paying for it on the installment plan. Among the 18,000 workmen only 140 still lived in conditions which could be called "bad" in the reports.
And the output of Ford automobiles had increased over 20 per cent.
That year, with an eight-hour day in force, and $10,000,000 divided in extra profits among the men, the factory produced over 100,000 more cars than it had produced during the preceding year, under the old conditions.