Ford CEO Jim Farley raises alarm, says ‘we’re in trouble as a country’ | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

President Donald Trump didn’t have the best week.

Outside of the release of emails he has fought to keep hidden, the president rattled his own base with a comment he made about the U.S. workforce during an interview with Fox News.

When pressed about the level of talent the U.S. has to fuel its AI ambitions, President Trump stated that the U.S. would need to import talent because “you can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m gonna put you into a factory. We’re gonna make missiles.'”

Some in his base have wanted him to abolish the H-1B non-immigrant visa program for temporary employment that U.S. employers have used to fill white collar jobs because they feel those jobs should go to American citizens.

However, Trump went on to explain that there are some jobs for which U.S. workers aren’t trained, such as electric vehicle battery assembly.

While the furor online from Trump’s Make America Great Again base has been loud, the reality is that the president is correct, and the problem extends past highly skilled white-collar jobs.

Ford CEO Jim Farley sat down with the “Office Hours: Business Edition” podcast to discuss a range of issues. His tone turned serious when the discussion got to the U.S. workforce.

Ford CEO Jim Farley has a stark warning about the U.S. workforce.

Photo by Bill Pugliano on Getty Images

Ford CEO Jim Farley says “we’re in trouble in our country” when it comes to the U.S. workforce

As a C-suite exec, Jim Farley has reached the absolute top of his profession. However, in a recent interview with the Office Hours podcast, Farley wants everyone to know that he respects blue-collar workers.

“In my humble opinion, those hard-working jobs made our country what it is today,” Farley told host Monica Langley. “It is not easy work, it is hard, it is tedious, and it is important.”

Ford’s total U.S. sales by year:

2024: 2.08 million vehicles sold, +4.2%
2023: 1.99 million vehicles sold, +7.1%
2022: 1.77 million vehicles sold, -2.2%
2021: 1.9 million vehicles sold, -6.8% Source: Best-Selling Cars

But as crucial as those mechanic, emergency services, factory worker, plumber, electrician, and trucking jobs are, there are over 1 million unfilled positions in those sectors, according to Farley.

“The essential economy, we are in trouble in our country,” Farley warned. “We are not talking about this enough. It’s a very serious thing. We don’t have trade schools. We are not investing in educating the next generation.”

Farley went on to say that the jobs that allowed his grandfather to build a middle-class life and raise a family are available in abundance, but U.S. workers are not adequately trained to do those jobs.

At his own company, Farley says Ford has 5,000 openings for mechanics.

“A bay with a lift and tools, and no one working it. It’s a $120,000-a-year job, but it takes you five years to learn how to do it. Take a diesel out of a Super Duty; it takes a lot of skill. You need to know what you’re doing,” Farley.

Even more worrying, Farley says that if there is an armed conflict in the near future, the U.S. will struggle to “make the tanks and the planes, so this is a self-defense for our country issue.”

Jim Farley says U.S. is in deep trouble compared to China

Ford CEO Jim Farley says that blue-collar jobs not only pay well, but they are critical to the health and defense of the United States.

But if good pay and a path to the middle class aren’t enough to attract interested workers, what can we do to address the problem?

“If we work together like we always have in America, we start to shine a light on the problem, and we start getting like-minded people together… and we get after this with the government. Through education, we can solve this, but we have a lot of work to do,” Farley said.

Podcast host Morgan Langley reminded Farley that company founder Henry Ford helped pave the way for the new American middle class when he started paying his factory workers $5 a day in 1914, which at the time was an unheard-of amount for manual labor.

Farley reminded Langley that Ford was the first of the Big 3 automakers to ratify a union agreement with the UAW, and the Canadian unions, the last time there was a big labor strike.

“I believe that we learned during Covid that a two-tier wage system, where we pay some people $17 an hour and other people $25 an hour, wouldn’t work… so we got rid of the lower tier, paid everyone the same, now those people have a career at Ford, like my grandfather,” Farley said.