Good concept here where there should not be misunderstanding.

When Henry Ford attempted to build the first commodity private motorcar for the middle class worker whilst also paying his assembly line workers enough to afford one of their own from their wages alone it was by design a very delicate balance. The idea was to enable someone, even without significant resources or higher education, who had the aptitude and is a hard worker to become an employee and in a measurable way start to join the middle class their own self. The assembly line was engineered to be profitable enough to accomplish this to begin with. What this meant was being able to gradually afford a house, a car, a spouse, and kids on one worker's income of course. Could be accelerated with overtime. Upward mobility financially by productive labor alone without having to receive a promotion in the workplace, or having to rely on family or other resources to become established.

Ford's factory as a system was created to be a value- and money-making-machine with everyone involved moving ahead together.

This element of mass-production of a new commodity for a large target class while simulaneously enabling new workers to enter the target class from their labor alone is one of the things that allows it to scale so well, and when this element is compromised the scaling may be unsteady and/or unsustainable.

This element is also not very present on the Boeing assembly line. Mass-produced commercial aircraft are still commodities but no middle class person is expected to purchase one using their labor alone. Balance is required but at a different pivot point. With Ford starting at a 0X target the degree of balance should be more obvious and easier to maintain. Boeing is a good example of the opposite extreme, those aircraft are so expensive who knows what multiple would be required just to get something like that off the ground. The higher the labor multiple like this you would think the more difficult the balance would be to maintain, but of course any multiple is huge compared to zero. And there's no more benchmark for anybody since the US dollar is so compromised now, a worker may have to do lots of overtime just to afford a car that's reliable enough to get to work in the first place, which can keep a home itself out of reach for their forseeable future.

Anyway, there have always been craftsworkers who build unique things for royalty, others who mass-produce commodities intended for the middle class, and anything in between. Either way the most successful can sell all that they can make.

New cars and aircraft are not designed for those whose resources are so low that they are below middle class. Such low-resource individuals can only maintain economically by doing without the full-price commodities of the middle class, substituting with second-hand and surplus commodities when possible. For them, higher expenditure levels can be unsound but are often entertained in order to give the appearance of full middle-class status. For instance the purchase of a brand new car or brand new home instead of second-hand may provide some degree of comfort but can seriously hamper any true progress up into the full middle class, especially for someone who is making a credit purchase.

You're not truly in the middle class unless you can actually afford to pay cash for the true middle class commodities. Extravagances on credit maybe but not necessities or common commodities.

Seems to me that when assembly lines are truly bettering the wealth of their workers, everything goes well until you can no longer sell all that you can make.

Uh-oh.

Employers are always going to have the upper hand, but during cutbacks even the truly generous payers can seldom recover anything significant by limiting employee compensation without being quite destructive to the structure that the founder had built. Employee cutbacks beyond a certain level, or in the case of employers who are on the edge by paying "market" or "competitive" rates, will end up generally halting employee's upward mobility in a tangible way. Even under the most severe conditions, shareholders with strengh and conviction are supposed to be there to absorb almost all of the financial fluctuations. Capitalists who fail to intentionally restore prosperity to their employees as soon as possible seem to be a great source of opportunity for a union to become competitive in offering more to the employees in bulk than the actual employer is doing on their own at the time.

Balancing the employee's entire financial opportunity versus a relatively small percentage of the bottom line is not easy even when it's intentionally generous.

Employee prosperity is always at the discretion of the involved capitalist, and the labor market is suposed to be set by comparison to how productive those workers would be if in business individually or teaming in a way that allows them to absorb almost all of the gains or losses from operations themselves.

Looks like without undue extraneous influence, capitalism involving other people's money would not be as rewarding compared to plain entrepreneurialism where the worker has the resources to fund the venture independently of other people's money.

How absurd is that?