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
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Ford CEO Jim Farley hears from older employees Some young workers at the automaker are taking shifts Amazon He said it was necessary to make ends meet at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Farley said he took advantage of founder Henry Ford’s decision to raise factory wages to $5 a day in 1914 to turn temporary workers into full-time employees. Young people previously avoided manufacturing jobs due to low wages.
Some economists credit automaker Henry Ford with jump-starting the American middle class in the 20th century by increasing factory wages in January 1914. for $5That’s more than twice the average wage for an eight-hour workday.
More than 100 years later, faced with the reality that many employees are “barely making ends meet,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said he took a page out of the founder’s playbook.
Farley said the automaker’s CEO realized the need for a change in the workplace when he spoke with senior employees during union contract negotiations and learned that younger Ford employees were working multiple jobs and getting insufficient sleep due to low wages. report with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year.
“The older workers at the company said, ‘None of the younger people want to work here. Jim, you’re paying $17 an hour and they’re too stressed out,'” Farley said.
Farley learned that some workers also found jobs at Amazon, working eight-hour days and sleeping only three or four hours before switching to seven-hour shifts at Ford. At the Ford Pro Accelerate event in September, the CEO said entry-level factory workers told him: 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. The transition was summarized as follows: 2019 contract negotiations We partnered with the United Auto Workers (UAW) to enable temporary workers to begin working full-time at Ford after two years of continuous employment.
“This 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.”
Ford’s decision to double factory wages in 1914 was not altruistic; Rather, it was a strategy to attract a stable workforce while also providing an incentive for its own workers to purchase Ford products.
“He said, ‘I’m doing this because I want my factory workers to buy my cars. If they make enough money, they’ll buy my product,'” Farley said. “It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Farley, an advocate for increasing U.S. manufacturing productivity to support the underlying economy, advocated for young workers to have strong business experiences. Earlier this month, he sounded the alarm about the shortage of manual labor jobs, saying on an episode of the show: Office Hours: Business Edition podcast owned by Ford 5,000 open mechanical positions Despite salaries of up to $120,000 for this position, they remain unfilled.
