Ford’s CEO Jim Farley thinks America needs a wake-up call.
Speaking on the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast, Farley said Ford had 5,000 open mechanic positions that it hasn’t been able to fill, despite the possibility of an eye-popping $120,000 salary—nearly double the American worker’s median salary.
And it’s not just Ford, added Farley. The carmaker’s struggle to fill jobs that require training and manual labor are indicative of a general shortage for manual-labor jobs in the U.S., he added.
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Farley told host Monica Langley. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, and tradesmen. It’s a very serious thing.”
While President Donald Trump has centered his economic agenda on bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., there remains a gap between the number of factory jobs open and the number of people willing to fill them.
There were more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs open as of August, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, despite a 4.3% unemployment rate, which is higher than in previous years. A 2024 study from the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte also found more than half of the 200 manufacturing firms surveyed said recruiting and retaining workers was their top struggle.
Yet, Farley said jobs in the trades like those at Ford “made our country what it is,” and allowed people like his grandfather—who worked on the company’s flagship Model T and was employee 389 at the company—to have good lives.
Farley said the company is doing better on wages. It got rid of the lowest tier of its wage scale, and agreed to give workers a 25% salary bump over four years as part of its agreement with the United Auto Workers union in 2023.
Still, part of the problem for the shortage of manufacturing jobs is the lack of education and training, according to Farley. He noted, for example, learning to take a diesel engine out of a Ford Super Duty truck takes at least five years. The current system is not meeting the standard, he added.
“We do not have trade schools,” he said. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for his family.”
To be sure, younger people may be leading the charge on filling the gap in manufacturing positions. Gen Z is increasingly straying from the traditional college path and attending trade schools in an effort to avoid cumbersome student loans while also snagging a well paying job.
Enrollment in vocational school jumped 16% last year, rising to the highest level since National Student Clearinghouse started tracking data in 2018, Fortune previously reported. However, the top jobs paying more than $200,000 per year mostly require advanced degrees, according to a study by job platform Ladders.
