Ford workers told their CEO, “None of the young people want to work here.” So Jim Farley took a page from the founder’s playbook

More than 100 years later, faced with the reality of many employees “barely getting by,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said he took a page out of the founder’s playbook.

Farley said in a statement that the automaker’s CEO realized the need to make a change in his workplace when he spoke to veteran employees during union contract negotiations and learned that younger Ford employees were working multiple jobs and not getting enough sleep because of low wages. interview With journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year.

“The older workers who were at the company said, ‘None of the young people want to work here. Jim, you’re paying $17 an hour,’ and they’re getting very nervous,” Farley said.

Farley learned that some workers also held jobs at Amazon, where they worked eight-hour days before joining a seven-hour shift at Ford, sleeping only three or four hours. At a Ford Pro Accelerate event in September, the CEO said junior plant workers told him so Work up to three jobs.

As a result, the company turned temporary workers into full-time employees, making them eligible for higher wages, profit-sharing checks, and better health care coverage. The transition is explained in Contract negotiations 2019 With the United Auto Workers (UAW), temporary workers are able to work full-time after two years of continuous employment at Ford.

“It wasn’t easy,” Farley said. “It was expensive. But I think these are the kind of changes we need to make in our country.”

Ford’s decision to double factory wages in 1914 was not an altruistic decision, but rather a strategy to attract a stable workforce, as well as provide an incentive for his workers to be able to purchase Ford products.

“He said, ‘I’m doing this because I want the factory worker to buy my cars. If they make enough money, they’ll buy my product,'” Farley said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.”

Difficulty attracting Gen Z business workers

Farley, a proponent of increasing U.S. manufacturing productivity to support the underlying economy, has called for young workers to have solid business experiences. Earlier this month, he sounded the alarm about the shortage of manual labor jobs, saying on an episode of the show Business Hours: Business Edition Podcast Which Ford had 5,000 open mechanic positions Which remained vacant, despite the $120,000 salary for the role.

“Our governments have to get really serious about investing in trade schools and skilled trades,” he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “If you go to Germany, every one of our factory workers has an apprentice who starts in middle school. And every one of these jobs has someone behind them for eight years who is being trained.”

Although seeing us 3.8 million new manufacturing jobs By 2033, according to Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute, the younger generation of workers has largely turned away from the career path. as Some give up college degreesGeneration Z enrollment in business schools is… In heightbut the newest generation entering the labor market is largely… Avoid factory jobsdue to lower wages, according to a 2023 Soter Analytics study. U.S. manufacturing jobs have an average Pay $25 per hour– About $51,890 per year – which is less than Average American salary From $66,600.

US automakers, such as Ford, may be trying to make it attractive for young workers to start manufacturing careers, but they are still not immune to workers’ complaints about wages. In 2023, thousands of UAW members, including 16,600 Ford employees, went on strike before… Reach a contract agreement in October of that year, which, in addition to the wage increase, also reduced the period of time needed for a temporary worker to become full-time.

Farley called the strike “completely unnecessary” from management’s perspective and maintained that the burden of improving trade workers’ wages does not fall solely on Ford.

“We’re not just going to hope things get better,” he said. “We have the resources and knowledge, 120 years later, to solve these problems, but we need more help from others.”

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com On June 30, 2025.

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