The policy did come directly from Henry Ford [1], and in 1926, Ford himself wrote:
> "The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers." [ibid]
Although employee turnover may have been a factor, the source material for Tim Worstall's quoted excerpt in 2012 continued,
> "The $5-a-day rate was about half pay and half bonus. The bonus came with character requirements and was enforced by the Socialization Organization. This was a committee that would visit the employees' homes to ensure that they were doing things the "American way." They were supposed to avoid social ills such as gambling and drinking. They were to learn English, and many (primarily the recent immigrants) had to attend classes to become "Americanized." Women were not eligible for the bonus unless they were single and supporting the family. Also, men were not eligible if their wives worked outside the home. Other groups also offered classes to help immigrants and southern blacks adapt to the Detroit area, but none were so prominent as the Ford plan." [2]
And this is where so much more of the nuance really comes in to play, because Ford was a complex character. Among his complexities was a really paternalistic view of his workers and of society; he believed in an idealized, perfect society, and sought to create it and to force others to live in it. [3]
The $5-a-day plan solved a handful of problems then. It gave Ford a lot of free advertising in the press, it added a significant amount of pressure to his competitors, it ultimately made his automobile a little bit cheaper, and it supported his paternalism for his workers.
You could do worse for a modern analogue for Henry Ford than Elon Musk. He's a really divisive figure in a lot of discussions, alternately driven by impassioned visions of a hypothetical society and by larger-than-normal faults. He makes decisions that are part business and part ideology, and so did Ford.
[1]: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-min...
[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20121224153214/https://www.michig...
[3]: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City