Anyone aware of DIRECT quotes from Mr. Ford regarding his reasons for paying a substantially higher rate? Because I believe this popularly accepted reason is pure spin and BS.
My understanding of why wages were dooubled was because Mr. Ford expected things done a certain way, he wanted to the ability to command that type of following and the ability to fire a man on the spot with ten good relacements standing in line.
This liberal "building the middle class" stuff is pure liberal delusion.
Exactly! How many Ford employees were there?
You're partly right. The big issue for Ford was that it took a couple of months to train a worker for the line, and the line was, well, a grind. Workers would get sick of it and quit, taking all those months of training with them when they went across town to GM. The $5 a day wage was what they figured it was worth to keep those employees from leaving. The rest was just spin that Ford was happy to encourage, although the adulation went to his head and he began to think of himself as some kind of patriarch, leading to the bad Ford days of the 1930s, with his own system of secret police, spies, informers, beatings and so on.