Henry Ford on Employment

“The work is always there, but what men wait for is employment. It is not their fault; they have been taught for ages that it is employment and not work that counts. An employer is usually a man who has tackled the work; an employee is usually a man who is satisfied with the security of a job on another man’s work.”

“More men seek wages than seek work. If work be put first, then we shall get somewhere-for the amount of work to be done is always unlimited. The amount of work to be done never fails-only the money to pay for work seems to fail. But the money will not fail if the mind be constantly on the work instead of on the wages or the profits. The work will then provide both the wages and the profits.”

“A job is not in the nature of a permanent endowment. It is an opportunity to gain experience in a certain kind of work and the man in the job ought to be pressing forward to make further use of the experience he is gaining. It only makes for eventual poverty to regard a man in a job as a dependent who must be kept in his job, or to regard a specific job as something that must be retained because a certain man occupies it. That can be done in politics but it cannot be done in business. Customers are freer to retaliate than are taxpayers.”