To compare worker compensation across economies, you have to look not at their nominal compensation, but what that compensation will buy. From Semper Doctrina at semperdoctrina.substack.com:
Chinese Workers Better Paid than US Counterparts!
Recently, there have been a number of posts online talking about how much Henry Ford paid his workers a century ago.
“After much trial and error, in 1913 Henry Ford and his employees successfully began using this innovation [the assembly line] at our Highland Park assembly plant. … Yet while the work of assembling an automobile was now simplified, workers began to leave Ford Motor Company to work for their competitors. The reason was workers found the assembly line work boring as they were now doing only one or two task(s) instead of working to build an entire vehicle. … In order to persuade workers to stay with Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford introduced the $5 workday. The $5 workday involved profit sharing payments that would more than double the worker’s daily wage, raising it to $5.” – FORD company website
FORD DOUBLED HIS WORKERS’ WAGES TO GET THEM TO STAY
Turnover is very costly. In 1913, Ford hired 52,000 workers to get 14,000 to stay! Imagine training four workers and losing three of them, a nearly 75% rate of attrition. With this, and the resulting stops and starts, Ford could never keep his new production line going. Something had to be done: Ford doubled their wages.
ONLINE, CHATTER IS ABOUT FORD’S WAGES IN OUNCES OF GOLD
In 1913, the price of gold was fixed at $20.67 per ounce. This was a feature of the Gold Standard Act of 1900 defining the United States dollar by gold weight and requiring the United States Treasury to redeem, on demand and in gold coin only, paper currency.
