More than 100 years later, facing the reality of many employees “barely getting by,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said he took a page out of the founder’s playbook.
“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 said.
“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.”
Ford’s own decision to double factory wages in 1914 was not altruistic, but rather a strategy to attract a stable workforce, as well as provide a stimulus for his own workers to be able to afford Ford products.
“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 said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.”
Farley, a proponent of growing U.S. manufacturing productivity to support the essential economy, has advocated for young workers to have strong trade experiences.
“Our governments have to get really serious about investing in trade schools and skilled trades,” he said. “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.”
Farley called the strike “completely unnecessary” from management’s perspective and maintained the onus of improving trade workers’ wages isn’t just on Ford.
“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.”
