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.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.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.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.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.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.