THE NEW REPUBLIC, Meagan Day, February 12, 2023 

The argument that corporations have historically been a force for good—and can be again—is wishful thinking.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
William Magnuson
Basic Books
ISBN-13 9781541601574

Between 1927 and 1931, the number of suicides in Detroit rose fivefold. The cause was unmistakable: The stock market crash of 1929 had hit the auto industry hard, stimulating widespread unemployment in Motor City. In 1932 the Detroit Times estimated that, accounting for dependents, nearly 700,000 people were directly affected by unemployment—almost half the population of the city. Suicide often came on the heels of starvation.

Of the city’s unemployed, over one-third were known as “Ford cases,” meaning they’d been laid off by the Ford Motor Company. “The average man won’t really do a day’s work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it,” the company’s founder, Henry Ford, told an Ohio newspaper in 1931, as the Great Depression deepened. “There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.” His words contradicted reality: Here were tens of thousands of his own former employees totally immiserated, as “caught” as could be and desperate for work, but there were no jobs for them.

Source: The New Republic, Portside