Ford’s assembly lines punished smiling as deliberate work slowdown

Evidence

It’s as if Donaldson’s warehouse reverses what was once dubbed the “Fordization of the face,” a descriptive phrase for the extreme emotional control required by managers of Henry Ford’s assembly line. In Ford’s factory, “humming, whistling or even smiling on the job were, in the judgment of Ford Service, evidence of soldiering [deliberate resistance to speed-up] or insubordination,” with one employee even being fired for “smiling” and “laughing with the other fellows.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 328

Categorization

• XREF: This is the key Fordization-of-the-face fact, inversional contrast for the Corpocene thesis on emotional labor.
• CANDY: A worker fired for smiling and laughing at Ford’s plant is an immediately tweetable, self-contained historical oddity.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in labor history or emotional labor; Ford Service reportedly fired workers for humming, whistling, and smiling.