``Wedding and Hallesches Tor are populated mostly by a less skilled, poorly paid, and sometimes itinerant working class. To their west and north lay Siemensstadt, founded just before World War I and home of the giant Siemens works, Berlin and Germany's great electrotechnical company. Its many factories in Berlin alone churned out electrical products large and small, lightbulbs and applicance for the home and giant generators for power plants. In 1925 it had more than sixty-six thousand employees in its Berlin plants, more than half of the firms's entire labor force. As one of the high-tech firms of its day, Siemens relied greatly on the knowledge and abilities of its engineers, technicians, and most skilled workers. By the mid-1920s, it was a leading proponent of rationalization, the application of scientific methods to the production process, which also entailed ever closer supervision of the workers on the shop floor and ever more finely grained pay schedules based on individiual worker's productivity.
Siemens was also a pioneer of paternalism. From its early days in the nineteeth century it provided health benefits and pensions to its workers. The firm recognized that if it wanted loyal and productive workers, it had to meet their needs; it also had to shape their mentalities, and not only for the eight, nine, or twelve hours that they labored inside the factory gates....'' (74p)
So we could say the same about Ford and the modernization of capitalism in general. But the import in Weimar would become something more menacing as the NSDP took over and carried out this rationalization of work and life through out the larger society...
CG