20 Wild Things Bosses Once Controlled Off The Clock

Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, introduced his $5-a-day pay rate in 1914. A base wage of $2.34 was guaranteed. The remaining $2.66 was based on “profit-sharing.” But this profit-sharing had to be earned by making it through a home inspection conducted by inspectors in Ford’s internal Sociological Department, who arrived without warning to check for cleanliness, bank savings, children’s school attendance, and whether workers were sober after work hours. Failure to make improvements within six months could result in losing one’s job, not just the extra money.

The flight attendants on United, Pan American, American, and other airlines didn’t just work as servers. They were weighed off duty against a chart that correlated height and weight, meaning that a 5-foot-3 woman could weigh no more than 118 pounds, while the tallest attendants, at 5-foot-8, topped out at 135 pounds. If you went over, you were suspended and unpaid. If you didn’t get back to your prescribed weight, you were fired. And for years, this was not a subject of debate.

Beginning in 1883, English-born entrepreneur Fred Harvey hired single, young women to serve food at his restaurants along the Santa Fe Railway. In order to convince Victorian-age railway travelers that the women working in his establishments were reputable, he provided them with dormitory-style housing with a housemother on site and imposed a 10 p.m. curfew. There were strict rules about male visitors for the Harvey Girls. Violate the curfew or bring home a secret guest, and you lose your room and your job in one fell swoop.

Comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested on a manslaughter charge in 1921, but he was eventually acquitted. Universal Pictures responded to the scandal by adding the first formal morality clause to talent contracts, and other studios followed within a year. Studios could use these provisions to terminate an actor’s employment if their behavior brought them public disrepute. Private detectives were hired to monitor celebrities’ activities away from the studio lot.

From the late 1800s until the 1930s, marriage bars were standard clauses in female teachers’ contracts. They required schools to terminate a teacher’s job if she married. Surveys from the Great Depression found that over 80% of school districts would not hire married women, while more than 50% terminated the positions of unmarried teachers who subsequently married because, according to prevailing wisdom, married women’s jobs were to be reserved for men. Some teachers even got married in secret so as to continue working.

Until the mid-1940s, coal and metal miners worked for free on the journey from the mine’s entrance down to the coal seam. To do that, they had to carry their gear up to several miles through unlit, gaseous underground passageways, a trek that took anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes in either direction. It was not until United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) president John L. Lewis took up the battle that two Supreme Court decisions in the mid-1940s held that the trip was compensable work.

Rule G, which was adopted by a railroad association in 1897, prohibited drinking on the job, but it also prohibited engineers, conductors, and brakemen from going to bars outside of work. The railroads sent detectives to watch bars in railway towns, and anyone who was caught drinking while not working could be instantly fired, regardless of how long they had worked there.

From the 1880s until the 1930s, employers in isolated coal, timber, and textile towns throughout Appalachia and the South paid some portion of their workers’ wages with scrip. Unlike real U.S. currency, this scrip could only be redeemed at the company store, where prices were typically 25-50 percent higher than those of local, independent merchants. If you traded your scrip for cash, or shopped elsewhere, you risked having your wages cut, being fired, or being evicted from company housing.

Prior to 1946, employees of Mt. Clemens Pottery in Michigan, as well as other factories, were required to come 15-30 minutes before their scheduled shift to change into clothing and shoes, then stand by their work stations ready for the whistle to blow, or they would be locked out and docked pay. In Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery, the U.S. Supreme Court found such time was work that had to be paid for, which resulted in the passage of the Portal-to-Portal Act the following year.

Bell Telephone employed young unmarried females to work on its telephone switchboards and provided them with company dormitories close to the telephone exchanges for night and split shifts. Matrons who lived in the dormitories enforced a 9 p.m. curfew and room inspections and banned men completely. These conditions were later documented by the U.S. Women’s Bureau. They were finally eased only when dial switching made the overnight operator positions obsolete.

Henry Ford established the Ford English School at his Highland Park, Michigan plant in 1913 to help non-English-speaking immigrants learn English, civics, and proper hygiene. Workers attended classes before or after a full shift, unpaid. Skipping a class or falling behind cost a worker his profit-sharing bonus and could land him in trouble with management. In fact, graduates even took part in a pageant where they walked into a prop pot in their native clothing and then stepped out wearing Western clothes.

It was rare for a female teacher to rent her own apartment in a small rural town in America at the start of the 20th century. Instead, a teaching contract stipulated that she must live with an approved family, perhaps a trustee or a minister. This meant that a local family could collect the rent and still have control over her evening hours and visitors. It would have been considered a breach of contract for her to move in anywhere else.

In company towns such as railroad-car magnate George Pullman’s Pullman, Ill., and the coal and timber camps in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the boss not only owned every home but also every square foot of dirt. In order to stave off organized labor, the boss even erected a town church where families were expected to attend company-sponsored worship services on their sole day off. Managers kept careful count of attendance, and if a family missed too many Sundays, or partook of alcohol on the Sabbath, they would not only lose their employment but also their home.

In the days before motor trucks, drayage companies and breweries used horses for deliveries, and the drivers of those wagons were known as teamsters. Since employers weren’t willing to employ individual stable hands to care for the horses, they required teamsters to take care of the company horses on their off day, Sunday, and before their shifts on working days. Failure to perform stable duties could mean the loss of one’s team. The practice declined in the 1910s and 1920s with the advent of motor trucks and unionization.

There was an assumption that by the time carpenters, stonemasons, and machinists arrived at work, they should have had their tools freshly sharpened. But they wouldn’t be compensated for doing so by the employer. So they spent 5 to 10 hours a week of their own time at home, grinding and filing at hand-cranked grindstones. Paid sharpening time on the job didn’t come to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners until the 1930s.

During “welfare capitalism” in the early 20th century, companies such as Milton Hershey’s chocolate company, the Pullman Palace Car Company, and National Cash Register sponsored company baseball teams and marching bands, both to boost their public image and to discourage unionization. Participation was voluntary. But in reality, by joining, employees could gain greater job security, preferential treatment for overtime, and immunity from layoffs. By declining, they became viewed as troublemakers or union sympathizers and were subject to demotion.

Between the late 1800s and the mid-1900s, hotels, shops, and eateries expected their sales clerks, housekeeping staff, and waitresses to present themselves each day in clean aprons, crisp collars, and white gloves. Employers offered no laundry service or stipend to cover the cost of maintaining uniforms. Laborers were responsible for doing their own hand-washing and ironing at home, buying their own soap and heating their own irons. According to the U.S. Women’s Bureau, an employee’s presence in a shabby or dingy outfit might mean suspension or dismissal.

In the rural U.S. and Canada from the 1870s through the 1930s, one-room schoolhouses couldn’t afford to have a custodian. Teachers showed up hours before class in the winter, not on the clock, to chop wood, carry coal and water, wipe soot off the oil lamp, and heat the potbelly stove before children came in. That was the norm until consolidated school districts replaced the one-room schools many decades later.

The railroad companies maintained a roster of standby engineers, conductors, and brakemen, the “extra board,” who had to remain available for on-call service by staying within a short distance of a messenger or telephone for twelve to twenty-four hours at a stretch. They were forbidden from drinking, leaving home, or traveling, but were paid only if actually called upon to run a train. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in 1944 in the case of Skidmore v. Swift & Co. that such controlled waiting time was work, and therefore payable.

Porters on Pullman’s sleeping cars were, with very few exceptions, Black men who were expected to report to their trains two to four hours before departure to load passengers’ baggage, polish the brass fittings, stock fresh linen, and make up berths. This “prep” time was not compensated and consumed approximately one-tenth of a porter’s life. In 1925, labor organizer A. Philip Randolph created the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and, after twelve years of struggle, the BSCP’s 1937 agreement with the Pullman Company gave porters compensation for their prep time.

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