Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary. You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?
>I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary. You'd be hard pressed to provide a search pattern in any search engine that would provide a top 5 result that isn't about Ford wage raises in 1914 being about anything else than worker retention. > You didn't provide any substan…
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-min...
Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.
But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”