The CEO of Ford has noticed that many young people do not want to work for him. Because young people avoid jobs in the industry.
Jim Farley, Chairman and CEO of the automotive manufacturer Ford, spoke in an interview with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival (via YouTube.com). This is reported by the English-language magazine Fortune.com.
In the conversation, Farley explained that older employees told him that young people no longer want to work at Ford:
The older employees, who had been with the company longer, said: ‘None of the young people want to work here. Jim, you pay $17 an hour, and they are so stressed.’
In the conversation with the employees, he noted that the employees were additionally working at Amazon, where they had already worked for eight hours before taking a seven-hour shift at Ford. Overall, they could only sleep three or four hours.
Even Henry Ford knew in 1914 that young people were likely to avoid industrial jobs due to low wages
What was the company’s “trick”? The company made temporary workers full-time employees so that they would be entitled to higher wages, profit sharing, and better health care. The transition was established in the contract negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW) for 2019, allowing temp workers to become full-time employees after two years of uninterrupted employment at Ford.
Farley said he referred to the decision of the company’s founder, Henry Ford, who in 1914 raised wages in the factory to $5 a day to make temporary workers full-time employees. Due to low wages, young people had previously avoided work in manufacturing. Farley explained that the step would not have been easy, but was necessary:
It was not easy. It was expensive. But I think this is the kind of change we need to make in our country.
A young CEO explains that one must work 80 hours a week in his company. But this receives little positive reactions. He himself defends himself: As a start-up, one has to compete with great competition that one must prevail against: The 22-year-old CEO of a company demands that his employees work 80 hours a week: “We do not offer a work-life balance”
