Famously, he raised wages to five dollars per day, far above the industry norm, just to keep workers on the job. Later this was spun as a brilliant maneuver to help his own employees afford Model Ts, turning them into consumers. It was actually a means of coping with a self-inflicted management crisis. In any case, Ford did not have to pay these high wages for long. As the entire industry shifted to the assembly line—and then other sectors of the economy followed suit—workers had little choice but to submit to the new manufacturing techniques.
