Ford CEO Jim Farley says he realized just how tight money was for many young workers when older employees pulled him aside during union talks and told him something troubling: some of their younger colleagues were finishing long shifts at Amazon, grabbing just a few hours of sleep, and then heading straight to the Ford plant.
That revelation, Farley said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, pushed him to look back at a pivotal moment in the company’s own history—when founder Henry Ford famously doubled factory wages to $5 a day in 1914—and apply a similar mindset today.
More than a century ago, Henry Ford’s move to raise pay is widely credited with helping to build America’s middle class. The decision more than doubled the average wage for an eight-hour day and reshaped industrial work.
Today, Farley says he saw echoes of that pressure on workers inside Ford’s plants. During contract negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), longtime employees told him that younger colleagues “didn’t want to work here” because starting wages were too low.
“The older workers who’d been at the company said, ‘None of the young people want to work here. Jim, you pay $17 an hour, and they are so stressed,’” Farley recalled.
He later learned that some workers were putting in eight hours at Amazon before coming to Ford for a seven-hour shift, getting only three or four hours of sleep in between. At a Ford Pro Accelerate event in September, Farley added that entry-level factory workers told him they were juggling as many as three jobs.
In response, Ford moved to convert many temporary workers into full-time employees, giving them access to higher wages, profit-sharing payments, and more robust health care benefits. The pathway was formalized in the 2019 UAW contract, which allowed temps to become full-time after two years of continuous employment at the company.
“It wasn’t easy to do,” Farley said. “It was expensive. But I think that’s the kind of changes we need to make in our country.”
Henry Ford’s original wage hike was driven by strategy as much as idealism. He wanted a stable, loyal workforce—and he wanted his own employees to be able to buy the cars they were building.
“He said, ‘I’m doing this because I want my factory worker to buy my cars. If they make enough money, they’ll buy my own product,’” Farley explained. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.”
A Growing Struggle to Attract Gen Z to the Trades
Farley has been outspoken about the need to strengthen U.S. manufacturing and the skilled trades that support it. Yet even with better pay on offer, he says automakers are struggling to fill critical roles.
On an episode of the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast earlier this month, Farley warned that Ford alone had 5,000 open mechanic jobs sitting unfilled, despite pay that can reach up to $120,000 a year.
“Our governments have to get really serious about investing in trade schools and skilled trades,” he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “You go to Germany, every one of our factory workers has an apprentice starting in junior high school. Every one of those jobs has a person behind it for eight years that is trained.”
Forecasts suggest the U.S. could see 3.8 million new manufacturing jobs by 2033, according to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute. Yet younger workers have been slow to embrace factory work. Even as some members of Gen Z turn away from four-year college degrees and enrollment in trade programs increases, many still avoid manufacturing roles, often citing low pay.
A 2023 Soter Analytics study found that younger workers view factory jobs as underpaid. The numbers bear some of that out: U.S. manufacturing jobs average about $25 per hour—or roughly $51,890 per year—below the overall American average salary of $66,600.
Higher Expectations, Higher Frustrations
Automakers like Ford are trying to reshape the image and reality of manufacturing jobs to make them more attractive to younger workers. But they are still confronting deep frustration over wages and working conditions.
In 2023, thousands of UAW members—including around 16,600 Ford employees—went on strike before securing a new contract that raised pay and shortened the time it takes for a temporary worker to advance to full-time status.
From management’s standpoint, Farley described the strike as “completely unnecessary.” Still, he emphasized that the responsibility for improving pay and prospects for trade workers cannot rest on one company alone.
“We’re not just going to hope it gets better,” he said. “We have the resources, and we have the know-how, after 120 years, to solve these problems, but we need more help from others.”
