The story of Henry Ford's $5 a day wages: not what you think (2012)
The story makes a good deal of sense if, in general, wages are set only partly by supply and demand, and partly by the employers-as-a-class's feelings of how much money people doing that sort of job ought to earn.<p>In this case production line workers were a relatively new thing, and Ford was helping to create a consensus about where they would fit in.<p>Part of the reason why simple supply and demand doesn't dictate a single level of wages is that there's a good deal of flexibility in what doing a job entails.<p>In this case it seems Ford was helping to decide that the workers would be skilled labourers: there'd be a training cost (what the article calls "a costly break-in period") and high enough wages to reduce turnover so as to amortise that cost.<p>The business about "character requirements" and visiting the employees' homes also looks like a conscious attempt to control where the workers fit in the class system.<p>The alternative would presumably have been to try to organise the production line to require less training, and accept the efficiency loss in exchange for the lower wage bill.