History of Ford Motor Company
[4] Malcomson, constrained by his coal business demands, turned to his uncle John S. Gray, the president of the German-American Savings Bank and a good friend.
On the strength of Gray's name, Malcomson recruited other business acquaintances to invest, including local merchants Albert Strelow and Vernon Fry, lawyers John Anderson and Horace Rackham, Charles T. Bennett of the Daisy Air Rifle Company, and his own clerk James Couzens.
In January 1914, Ford solved the employee turnover problem by doubling pay to $5 a day[17] cutting shifts from nine hours to an eight-hour day for a 5-day work week (which also increased sales; a line worker could buy a T with less than four months' pay),[15] and instituting hiring practices that identified the best workers, including disabled people considered unemployable by other firms.
[19] A factory was opened in Japan (1925) at Yokohama, and also in South Africa (1924)[20] and Australia (1925) as subsidiaries of Ford of Canada due to preferential tariff rules for Commonwealth countries.
Now, paint had become a production bottleneck; only Japan Black dried quickly enough, and not until Duco lacquer appeared in 1926 would other colors reappear on the T.[15] In 1915, Henry Ford went on a peace mission to Europe aboard a ship, joining other pacifists in efforts to stop World War I.
The decision was then upheld in the 1919 appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court which stated that:[citation needed] A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders.
Ford steadily lost market share to GM and Chrysler, as these and other domestic and foreign competitors began offering fresher automobiles with more innovative features and luxury options.
[25] During the Great Depression in the United States, Ford in common with other manufacturers, responded to the collapse in motor sales by reducing the scale of their operations and laying off workers.
Although Ford did assist a small number of distressed families with loans and parcels of land to work, the majority of the thousands of unskilled workers who were laid off were left to cope on their own.
[29] In 1933, the Soviets completed construction on a production line for the Ford Model-A passenger car, called the GAZ-A, and a light truck, the GAZ-AA.
[31] Ford's outspoken antisemitism, including his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, also lent credence to the view that he sympathized with the Nazis.
[35] The company produced 390,000 tanks and trucks, 27,000 engines, 270,000 Jeeps, over 8,000 B-24 Liberators, and hundreds of thousands of parts, gun mounts, and machine tools for the war effort.
[34] In the United Kingdom, Ford built a new factory in Trafford Park, Manchester during WWII where over 34,000 Rolls-Royce Merlin aero engines were completed by a workforce trained from scratch.
Henry decided then to resume direct control of the company, but this proved a very poor idea as he was 78 years old and suffering from heart problems and atherosclerosis.
When Henry II, who came to be called affectionately "Hank the Deuce," assumed command, the company was losing US$9 million a month and in financial chaos.
"[45] Robert McNamara advanced rapidly through a series of top-level management positions to the presidency of Ford on 9 November 1960, one day after John F. Kennedy's election.
[citation needed] Ford introduced the iconic Thunderbird in 1955 and the Edsel brand automobile line in 1958, following a US$250 million research and marketing campaign, which had failed to ask questions crucial for the marque's success.
[citation needed] In 1942, Elsa Iwanowa, who was then 16 years old and a resident of Rostov in the Soviet Union, and many other citizens of countries that were occupied by the Wehrmacht were transported in cattle cars to the western part of Germany, where they were displayed to visiting businessmen.
At about the same time, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund to compensate the surviving slave laborers.
Some have accused the early Fordist model of production of being exploitative, and Ford has been criticized as being willing to collaborate with dictatorships or hire mobs to intimidate union leaders and increase their profits through unethical means.
The lawsuit was dismissed in 1999 because the judge concluded "the issues ... concerned international treaties between nations and foreign policy and were thus in the realm of the executive branch.
Other attendees included Sosthenes Behn of ITT, Torkild Rieber of Texaco, James D. Mooney of General Motors, and Philip Dakin Wagoner of the Underwood Typewriter Company.
In a lawsuit initiated in 1996 by relatives of some of the estimated 600 Spanish citizens who disappeared in Argentina during the "Dirty War", evidence was presented to support the allegation that much of this repression was directed by Ford and the other major industrial firms.
In a second trial, a report brought by the CTA, and the testimonies of former Ford workers themselves, claimed that the company's Argentine factory was used between 1976 and 1978 as a detention center, and that management allowed the military to set up its own bunker inside the plant.
[74] In 1956, Canadian physicist Gilbert Norman Plass joined the Aeronutronic division of Ford, based in Newport Beach, California, which focused on aerospace and defense issues.
Both pieces made the claim that humanity was responsible for heating the Earth since the 1900s by burning fossil fuels and pumping massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.
He continued to study CO2 at Ford, using the company's computers to run early climate models and published his findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
After the Aeronutronic division of Ford was merged with Philco and rebranded as Philco-Ford, a researcher at the new company named Darrell Eugene Burch continued to examine the issue, co-authoring a series of 1967 scientific reports on CO2 absorption in the atmosphere.
An article published in Mother Jones contributed to a public controversy by saying that Ford knowingly released a design that would result in hundreds of deaths as well as calculating that it was cheaper to fight injury claims in court than make changes to the Pinto's fuel system.
[75][76] Public outcry related to the controversy and the Mother Jones article created political pressure on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration which initialed an investigation.
