Actually, the opposite. Also, it’s good to have your workforce also buying your cars. Henry Ford was a hard-nosed businessman; he didn’t introduce the $5 workday because he was a nice guy, says Bob Kreipke, corporate historian for the Ford Motor Co. “It was mainly to stabilize the workforce. And it sure did,” Kreipke says. “And raised the bar all over the world.” He says to understand why Ford thought this was a smart move in January 1914, you have to go back to another huge shift that happened a few months earlier: By 1913, Model T production totaled 200,000 — a feat made possible by the creation of the first moving assembly line. Conveyor belts transported small parts to workers, each of whom performed a specific task. This tremendously sped up production, but Ford still had a problem: While he had standardized production, he hadn’t standardized his workforce. Now, he didn’t need particularly skilled workers; he just needed ones who would do the same repetitive, specialized tasks hour after hour, day after day. Kreipke says there was chronic absenteeism and lots of worker turnover. So Ford gambled that higher wages would attract better, more reliable workers. npr.org/…/the-middle-class-took-off-100-years-ago…