6139008-History-of-Money

teachers stormed Chicago's City Hall to demand their back pay, and with pupils and parents paraded their picket signsthrough the Loop. They invaded several banks, disrupting business, to insist that bankers lend the city money to payteachers' salaries. Regiments of police, on foot and on horse, moved in and, as one reporter said, "in a moment unpaidpolicemen were cracking their clubs against the heads of unpaid schoolteachers." 3LIES DOCTOR THE PICTUREAt the onset of the depression, Henry Ford, one of the auto's Big Three, had astounded everyone by announcing a sevendollarday. This one-dollar increase over his previous daily minimum for common labor was his spectacular response toPresident Hoover's request that industry freeze present wages [from dropping,] to fight off disaster. Ford's gesture waspage-one news. But the publicity front of this one-man battle against the depression obscured another fact, reported bythe New York Times: Ford was cutting wages severely in the middle and upper brackets of labor. He paid off men in onedepartment and hired them in another at lower wages. Ford mechanic Robert L. Cruden, who has been quoted herebefore, described what was actually happening inside Ford:”In the fall of that year... Ford stated that thenceforth $7 aday would be the minimum wage in his plants. Immediately the bosses at the Rouge plant came around saying, "Go likehell, boys. If you're gonna get that raise you gotta increase production!" On our job production was raised from fifteenpans of stock a day to twenty-two, as a result of which one entire shift of our gang was laid off.“ Down the line from us,one man was given two drill presses to tend instead of one, as formerly. The inspector on our job was taken off and wehad to do our own inspecting and still keep up the new production rate. This speed-up took place all over the plant. It issignificant that, concomitant with the wage raise, nearly 30,000 men were laid off from the Rouge plant.”The claim that wages are never cut in Ford plants has always been part of the stock in trade of Ford publicity agents.But... Men are "transferred" from department to department, their wages being cut as they moved. I worked (in 1929)with men making $6.40 who had been making $7.20 and $7.60 before their transfer. A lathe operator of myacquaintance was recently transferred to washing, and cut from $8 to $7.60 a day. Even workers in the aristocraticLincoln plant are not immune — last spring all those making more than a dollar an hour were cut to that figure. As aresult of this process, very few workers in Ford plants now make more than $7.60 a day. To the outsider, this may seemhigh wages — but most Ford workers have lately been working only three days a week. In 1930 the wages of theaverage Ford worker were lass than a thousand dollars. Taking into account the prevailing three-day week, the sevenweeks of enforced idleness and a daily wage of $7.60, the worker made $959.20 during that year! In 1931 wages werecut and the working week reduced to one or two days a week. Ford claims not only that there are no wage cuts in Fordplants, but there are none in any of the $3,500 plants which make parts for him... The Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company,makers of Ford wheels, has cut wages of its tool-makers from $1.10 an hour to eighty cents, and increased the hours ofthe night shift to fourteen a night, seven nights a week. The Detroit Gear Company, makers of small Ford parts, took aleaf out of its master's book — it laid off all men getting ninety cents an hour and rehired them at seventy-three cents.At the same time their working hours were increased from nine to eleven and a half... 4The newly homeless were evicted directly to the street.DIFFICULTY IS THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPLOIT LABORMiners were supporting their families on as little as five dollars a week. This vivid account of a visit to a miningsettlement — a company town in the West Virginia hills — as written by Edmund Wilson: The people who work at Ward,West Virginia, live in little flat yellow houses on stilts that look like chicken-houses. They seem mean and flimsy on thesides of the hills and at the bottom of the hollow, in contrast to the magnificent mountains wooded now with the forestsof mid-June. Between those round and rich-foliaged hills, through the middle of the mining settlement, runs a road whichhas, on one side of it, a long row of obsolete col-cars, turned upside down and, on the other, a trickle of a creek, withbare yellow banks, half-dry yellow stones, yellowing rusty tin cans and the axles on wheels of old coal-cars. There areeight hundred or so families at Ward, two or three in most of the houses, and eight or ten children in most of thefamilies. And these families are just as much prisoners, just as much at the mercy of the owners of their dwellings as ifthey did live in a chicken-yard with a high wire fence around it.This settlement is situated in a long narrow valley which runs back among the West Virginia hills. The walls rise steep oneither side, and the end of the hollow is a blind alley. The Kelley's Creek Colliery Company owns Ward, and the Paisleyinterests own Mammoth, another settlement further back in the hollow, where the houses are not even painted yellowand where the standard of living is lower than at Ward. The people who live in those houses mine coal from thesurrounding hills. They work from eight to twelve hours a day, and they get from $2.60 to $3 for it. They are paid not inUnited States currency, but in chicken-feed specially coined by the companies — crude aluminum coins, thin and lightand some of them with holes in the middle... The company "scrip" is worth, on the average, about sixty cents on thedollar. The company forces the miners to trade at the company store — the only store of course on its property — andgoods are sold there at so much higher prices than at the non-company stores only three miles away that the minersnever come any nearer than 60 percent to their money's worth....The Hidden History Of Money & New World Order Usury Secrets Revealed at last! Page 303