Enlightened businesses like employing people for a long time – they contribute to the company’s culture and social capital!
It ought to be the employer’s ambition, as leader, to pay better wages than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman’s ambition to make this possible.… What good is industry if it be so unskillfully managed as not to return a living to everyone concerned?
Ford understood the value of skilled humans. But he also understood that, when he paid his workers more, he enabled them to earn enough money to buy his cars. You could say that Ford was the first evangelist for “trickle-up” economics: if you pay well at the bottom of the market, the whole economy will expand.
Now that we know trickle-down doesn’t work, it’s an interesting thought that a “trickle-up” world might prove strikingly more successful.
Instead of the entire economy sinking to the bottom, we would do better raising everyone’s boat.
From the book by Heffernan, Margaret. “A Bigger Prize.”