Henry Ford：My Life and Work, Additional Excerpt 175

When can a wage be considered adequate? How much of a living is reasonably to be expected from work? Have you ever considered what a wage does or ought to do? To say that it should pay the cost of living is to say almost nothing. The cost of living depends largely upon the efficiency of production and transportation; and the efficiency of these is the sum of the efficiencies of the management and the workers. Good work, well managed, ought to result in high wages and low living costs. If we attempt to regulate wages on living costs, we get nowhere. The cost of living is a result and we cannot expect to keep a result constant if we keep altering the factors which produce the result. When we try to regulate wages according to the cost of living, we are imitating a dog chasing his tail. And, anyhow, who is competent to say just what kind of living we shall base the costs on? Let us broaden our view and see what a wage is to the workmen--and what it ought to be.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213
Locator：Additional excerpt 175 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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