Nobody said it was the only problem, but it IS the main problem.
Bull. Shit. Henry Ford invented the 40 hour week and many high pay and other bennies for the workers which other companies had to emulate in order to compete. This was before unions came to be in this country.
The unions - like most everything we see today that started with ostensibly good intentions - became nothing but a tool for first the mob, and then the Left. The Mob used its political power to get and stay rich and to cover their misdeeds, the Left uses its political power to stay in power and to inhibit technological progress. PEX pipe is a example - Union-bought politicians kept this very efficient, reliable, safe and easy to install and maintain product forbidden in building codes for decades, just so union jobs wouldn't be lost. This is why you still have lead pipes in the Rust Belt. There's many other examples of this.
The MARKET would have given us every "union" bennie we see today, it was already happening.
Cloward and Piven are two people you should study. Under the guise of "eliminating poverty" they proposed using unions, the blacks and the poor to overload the system, to collapse it. They proposed usurping the Democrat party to obtain these ends. Their strategy was implemented in the 60s and IS working - you're starting to see the effects of it. Oh and meanwhile, they of course spend decades demagoguing "greedy corporations" and fools like you just lap that shit right up. My fucking GOD, people are SO stupid and gullible.
More likely it's the first one you ever read because it was on your 2nd grade reading level and was one short sentence.
Ford is best described as an early adopter of today’s familiar working hours, experts said.
"That happened more than 60 years after workers, through their unions, began organizing for an eight-hour day in the 1860s," said David Bensman, a professor at Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations. "When Ford adopted the eight-hour day for his factory, he was responding to a working force that had been demanding the eight-hour day for a long time."
Other experts agreed that labor unions, rather than Ford, deserve the primary credit for today’s working-hour schedule -- including Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Mich.
"Henry Ford was an early proponent of the five-day week, but the American Federation of Labor fought for it to be adopted more widely via contract negotiations," Anderson said. "Unions absolutely deserve much credit for the reform."
Does the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week come from Henry Ford, or labor unions? | PolitiFact
Surprisingly, Ford didn’t do it for scientific reasons (or solely for the health of his employees). Rather, one of the main reasons he came up with the idea to reduce the working hours of his staff was so employees would have enough free time to go out and realize they needed to buy stuff.
In an interview published in World’s Work magazine in 1926, Ford explains why he switched his workers from a 6-day, 48-hour workweek to a 5-day, 40-hour workweek but still paid employees the same wages:
Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles.?’?Henry Ford
So the 8-hour work day, 5-day workweek wasn’t chosen as the way to work for scientific reasons; instead, it was partly driven by the goal of increasing consumption.
The surprising reason we have a 40-hour week – Crew blog
Ford was tired of continuously losing good employees, he was trying to increase employee retention and at the same time increase profits, so he basically doubled wages and implemented a 5-day work week, and in the process effectively invented the modern weekend. It is Henry Ford who is widely credited with contributing to the creation of a middle class in the United States.
In addition, if you look at why Henry Ford did this, you will see that his reasons had nothing to do with charity, and everything to do with increasing profits and dealing with the forces of competition.
Economic Myths: The 5 Day Work Week And The 8 Hour Day « Hispanic Pundit