In 1914, Henry Ford paid his factory workers $5 a day, twice the going rate, with the aim of creating a broad middle class able to buy the cars they were building.The "aim" of the "Five Dollar Day" was to lower cost of production by inciting higher worker efficiency and, especially, to lower employee turnover which had been plaguing the new Ford assembly lines. That the goal was to create a consumer class of workers is utter tripe -- and the product of a deliberate revisionist history that Ford and his company and their willing biographers formulated long after the 1914 wage hike.
The Five Dollar Day has been used, as here, to justify so many "enlightened" policies, but never was it intended to create a buying class of worker-consumers. In fact, Ford deliberately couched the pay raise as a "profit-sharing" plan as a hedge against it not working. Also, he excluded unmarried men under 22 and all women from the wage hike.
Enlightened: hardly. Good business: you bet.