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union, or the local masons' union. The electricians and plumbers operated in the same way. These people all belonged if their respective unions were strong in the particular town in which they lived.
In addition to that there were a great many people who worked at what, under a more refined system, would have been classified as machinist work or machinist helper's work. They never did belong to any union. The automobile industry recruited workers from the farm areas of America - from the South, the Midwest, and even from the East. They left the New England farms and went out to Detroit and Flint, and so on, and worked in an automobile factory, where the wages were much better, particularly after Henry Ford conceived the idea of the five dollar a day wage - an unheard of high wage. I think that was one of the great items in the industrial revolution of the first half of the twentieth century - Ford's erratic, accidental, hitting upon a high wage for everybody. It did more to not only dislocate people, but to change the general pattern of industrial and domestic labor, farm labor, fishing labor, and so on, than any other one thing.
So that in drifting into Detroit, Flint, Gary, Toledo and other centers where automobiles were being made, there had been people who had never heard of a union
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