United States 1937

Synopsis

Henry Ford, the noted automaker and founder of Ford Motor Company, remained adamant in his antiunion opinion from the first unionizing attempts at his company in 1913. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had attempted to unionize Ford workers; Ford upped wages to $5 a day to appease them. As unions continued trying to get a toehold in the plant, Ford fought back increasingly harder. He went as far as to establish a faux union called the Knights of Dearborn, which was both antiunion and anti-Semitic.

Ford Motor Company was the only one of the so-called Big Three automakers that was not yet unionized by the late 1930s. As a result, employees were being paid about 5 cents less per hour than other industry workers and 10 cents less than Chrysler or General Motors (GM) workers who were represented by the United...