Ford CEO Jim Farley delivered an urgent message at the company’s Ford Pro Accelerate event on Tuesday, revealing a personal “epiphany” about the crisis facing Gen Z and the wider blue-collar workforce that led to his current push to emphasize the problems with what he calls the “essential economy.”
Speaking with Bloomberg’s David Westin at Michigan Central Station, Farley said he came to this realization during the United Auto Workers strike of 2023, when he was especially struck by stories from young factory employees. Many of them said they could not support themselves by working at Ford alone. “When I met with my entry factory workers, they were saying [they] had to have three jobs.” He said they would also work at places like Walmart and an Amazon fulfillment center: “‘You know, I get six hours of sleep, and I got three jobs.’”
In the short term, Farley said, Ford’s signature element in its new labor agreement was to get full wages to entry-level workers. But beyond that, he began looking at the labor shortage in trade work, starting with technicians. Farley described a revelation about the erosion of what blue-collar work used to represent—stability, pride, and a single income that could support a family. “Old-timers in our plants were saying, ‘It’s no longer a career, Mr. Farley. Working at Ford is no longer a career.’”
