Ford CEO Jim Farley learned from older employees that some young workers at the carmaker were taking shifts at Amazon to make ends meet, he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Farley said he drew on founder Henry Ford’s decision to raise factory wages to $5 a day in 1914 to make temporary workers into full-time employees. Young people have previously eschewed manufacturing jobs due to low wages.
Some economists credit carmaker Henry Ford for jump-starting the American middle class in the 20th century when, in January 1914, he hiked factory wages to $5, more than double the average wage for an eight-hour work day.
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 carmaker’s chief executive recognized the need to make a change in his workplace when he spoke to veteran employees during union contract negotiations and learned young Ford employees were working multiple jobs and getting inadequate sleep due to low wages, Farley said in an interview with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year.
“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.
