Sooner Safer Happier

Between 1910 and 1920, the population of Detroit doubled, reaching a million people. Most of that growth came from the arrival of immigrants looking for jobs in the new automobile industry. They came from Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and countries across eastern Europe. A 1915 survey found that the workforce in Ford’s Highland Park plant, which built the Model T, spoke more than fifty languages.1

So how did so many workers without fluency in a common language work together to assemble such a complex masterpiece of engineering?

In the days of Taylorism and then Fordism, workers didn’t need to talk to each other. The assemblers on the factory ...