The hazardous conditions were supposedly compensated for by high wages. Auto workers were among the highest-paid workers in the United States, yet wage rates were deceptive. In the 1920s, Henry Ford made headlines by promising $5 a day to every worker in his enterprises. Ford workers soon discovered that it was not quite $5 a day for not quite everyone. Fully a third of all Ford workers never got the $5 a day. Likewise, at Eldon, the 1969 $4-an-hour average Chrysler wage proved a fiction. Before any deductions and without the cost-of-living allowance, which did not cover all workers and was never more than 21 cents an hour, most job categories at Eldon paid around $3.60 an hour and none paid more than $3.94. Workers found it difficult to get figures on hourly pay for their particular job, and they were often cheated out of increases by complex union and company clerical procedures. What the workers did know was that overtime had become compulsory and that most of them needed the time-and-a-half paid for overtime to keep pace with inflation. Census Bureau figures revealed that the value of the products shipped out of the plant, minus the cost of materials, supplies, fuel, and electricity, came to $22,500 a year per worker, as compared to an average wage of $8,000 for a worker putting in a 40-hour week. During the period 1946-1969, wages had increased by 25 percent, while profits went up 77 percent, dividends 60 percent, personal corporate incomes 80 percent, and undistributed corporate prof- its 93 percent. The industry moaned about its cycle of booms and busts, but in 1970 General Motors remained the nation's (and the world's) largest manufacturing enterprise. Ford was the third largest. And Chrysler, "the weak sister," was fifth.