"The human cost of low wages is obvious and has been extensively documented. But there are important economic and business costs to low wages that are far less clear and little understood. Many of America’s largest employers pay as little as possible, driving down the consuming power of their workers, and then wonder why their customers are unable to spend."
"Henry Ford's Genius Wage Hike", Daniel Gross, The Daily Beast, 2014-01-06.
Some of the comments add a bit more nuance, such as Henry Ford was not all that angelic in paying "all" of his assembly-line workers that much. They had to meet certain personality standards with home checks that few people would tolerate today.
Henry Ford, at least partially, was following Adam Smith's advice:
"The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition, that they are going fast backwards."
His contemporaries and his successors seem to be bent at making things go "fast backwards".
For more ignored advice from Adam Smith, see "The Invisible Adam Smith".
