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That may be true, but it certainly helped that he DID pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they were making.

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It might be apocryphal, but my understanding is that he did this less out of a sense of civic duty and more because the skilled tradespeople liked their existing lifestyle and did not want to work in factories much, so they needed a big raise to be convinced.

I think it's even simpler than that: To run an assembly line, you need all stations staffed at the same time. You can't run the line if you're missing staff for just one station, but you still have to pay all the people who did show up.

So the easy solution is just to pay a lot and threaten to fire (and possibly blacklist) anyone who no-shows. Since the pay is much higher than they can get elsewhere, the people are much more likely to show up.

The high pay probably also helped find people who would tolerate the extremely intrusive practices of Ford's "morality police" (my term), who would inspect worker's homes to ensure they were living "the right way".

Not enough to offset losing their fingers left and right.

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