Ford workers told their CEO ‘none of the young people want to work here.’ So Jim Farley took a page out of 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.

In an interview with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year, Farley said 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 young Ford employees were working multiple jobs and not getting enough sleep because of low wages.

“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 entry-level plant workers told him they were working 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 shift was outlined in 2019 contract negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), whereby temporary workers would be 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 that Ford had 5,000 open mechanic jobs remaining unfilled, despite a salary of up to $120,000 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 the United States will see 3.8 million new manufacturing jobs by 2033, according to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, the younger generation of workers has largely moved away from the career path. As some are forgoing college degrees, Generation Z’s enrollment in trade schools is on the rise, but the newest generation entering the workforce is largely avoiding factory jobs, citing lower wages, according to a 2023 Soter Analytics study. The average wage for manufacturing jobs in the United States is $25 an hour — about $51,890 a year — which is less than the average American salary of $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 a contract deal was reached in October of that year, which, in addition to a wage increase, also reduced the time period 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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