A few years ago I asked why companies thought they could cut pay, benefits and hours and still expect their workforce to stay engaged and give a damn about the company’s success.

The answer, of course, is they can’t and the employees don’t.

Even as they cut pay and hours, retailers that sell “value pricing” still expect people to buy.

A good example is Wal-Mart, long known as the poster child of low compensation and king of the part-time workforce.

But in earnings calls the blame is on the costs that are going up with no mention of wages going down.

“Their income is going down while food costs are not,” William S. Simon, chief executive of Wal-Mart, said of the company’s customer base. “Gas and energy prices, while they’re abating, I think they’re still eating up a big piece of the customer’s budget.”

And down it has gone.

Adjusted for inflation, the national minimum wage reached a peak in 1968 and has lost about 6 percent of buying power since it was last raised in 2009.

I sometimes think Henry Ford was the last executive who understood that you can’t run a consumer economy if the consumers aren’t paid enough to buy stuff.

Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($110 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. (…) The move proved extremely profitable…

Obviously, Wal-Mart has never had an executive who understood that simple principle.

Congress doesn’t either.

Simon says income is going down, but apparently he can’t make the connection between that and his company’s actions.

Simon and his ilk know that people need disposable income to buy stuff, but for that to happen they need to stop treating their people as disposable.

Flickr image credit: Bernard Pollack

When you think about great entrepreneurs who comes to mind?

Not Steve Jobs if you limit entrepreneurs to those who invent something brand new; he didn’t invent technology; he took what was there, infused it with brilliant design and then convinced us we couldn’t live without it.

Bill Gates? Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Larry Ellison? Mark Zukerberg?

But could you build a powerful company culture off just their quotes 100 years from now?

Actually, will entrepreneurs even remember them in the Twenty-second Century?

But a century later you can do it off of Henry Ford quotes and it would be not only sustainable, but socially responsible.

Consider this small sample

• There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible. Ford practiced what he preached, too.
• Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right. This may be true for all of us, but it is especially true for entrepreneurs.
• Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. Overseeing each of these stages is a perfect description of a founder’s primary responsibility.
• Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. This isn’t to say that you should be blind to them, but keeping your focus on the goal allows you to overcome them by not losing track of what’s really important.
• A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. Tony Hsieh has proved this in spades, as has Jeff Bezos. The difference is that Hsieh also practices the first principle above; while Bezos has ignored it.
• Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. The first half of the sentence has been proven over and over, but it is the second half that determines whether the effort is successful.

Parts of Ford make a great role model, while other parts should be treated as poison, which, in the long-run, merely proves Ford mortal.

(Find more Ford quotes here.)

Image credit: Wikipedia