I'm no expert, but from a quick Google search that looks to be twice the median income for a mechanic. If they can't find workers at that income level, it seems to me that they are either filtering based on another criteria (more than just trade school, as the article suggests) or Ford must be such an awful place to work that nobody applies.
Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the mean annual wage of "Automotive Technicians and Repairers (SOC code 49-3020)" is $55,780 as of May 2025, so yeah, something doesn't add up.
For example, by law in California, auto mechanics make double minimum wage if they don't own their tools (so they can go buy some). That works out to about $68k/yr these days.
$120k/yr is not suuuuuper crazy in some areas for some auto work (think restoration). But generally, yes, Ford is not adding up here
> auto mechanics make double minimum wage if they don't own their tools (so they can go buy some)
I think you have that backwards:
"Typically, in California, if your employer wants you to provide and maintain your own work tools, they must pay you at least double the minimum wage. This means that in 2025, with California’s minimum wage at $16.50 per hour, your employer must pay you at least $33.00 per hour before they can require you to supply your own tools."
Auto mechanics make double minimum wage if the do own their own tools.
You could try to start a manufacturing business and see how it goes. It’s pretty dire.
Check out the ‘Smarter Everyday’ YouTube video for what it took to get people to design and manufacture a simple grill scrubber in the US.
They could find exactly one old retired guy with the knowledge and experience to make a mold, across several states.
You can get this done and delivered in 20 minutes in Shenzhen, and talk to an expert over a storefront countertop by walking over a few hundred feet from your business.
Yes, there is a lack of people with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a mass manufacturing business of parts everyone can get in China for a tenth of the cost.
There is not a lack of mechanics who can assemble Fords on a factory line from pre-built components with instructions. FFS.
Yes, America has a serious problem. No, the Ford CEO is not actually pointing it out. He's fucking lying so he can justify using what amounts to slave labor in other countries while also touting "patriotism" branding while also refusing to do even the tiniest possible to alleviate the problem via training.
This job is very different from your great grandfathers Ford factory job. Go tour a modern car factory.
The concept of a line worker is on its way out. The work is more on the side of maintaining the contraptions that make the car and retooling/tweaking it on a regular basis.
I’m not a native English speaker and I have a hard time figuring out what is behind the term "mechanics" here. What I find online seems to point to working in a garage and knowing how to do repairs, not being a line worker or technician in a factory doing maintenance on machinery like you say. In the article it’s confusing, they talk about servicing and trades school, so not really factory work. Maybe I’m lost in translation but it looks like even English speakers are not using a vague term to talk about different things here? What does is 120k job really about, working in a Ford garage fixing cars or being a factory technician?
In general (except for Tesla), there are no $Company garages in the US like the rest of the world, all repair work is handled by privately owned dealerships, whose existence is mandated by the government in most states. Experienced mechanics make about 40$ per hour at these, with juniors about half that. You'd not have trouble finding a mechanic for this rate, it being slightly above the median income.
I don't doubt there's fewer people in the trades, but I also don't see them making 120k generally and these claims seem questionable at best outside some very specific situations.
I worked at a company that actually paid well for a tech support team of about (roughly) 20 - 40 people at any given time covering a 24/7 schedule 365 days a year.
Over the course of TWENTY years the core group all stayed together. It was no mystery how, good training (that we did ourselves), good pay to start, good benefits, flexible / respectful management. It wasn't even 6 figures, but they were good jobs that made it hard for most everyone to leave, in a good way.
But all good things come to an end, tech support, I suspect like all "maintenance" roles they are eventually are seen as a cost and quality management starts to fade ... and everything falls apart. Management will bemoan not being able to find good people, while doing nothing to help make them good or treat them well.
I wonder how many leaders understand that it is their job to MAKE A GOOD TEAM and that it is their job to keep it that way, as opposed to expect people to just show up and do it for them?
Your last paragraph reminds me of modern dating and relationship-building: people demanding everything from everyone else but nothing of themselves. Wanting it all and giving nothing. I guess we can chalk this up to living in a failed world.
Mechanics are a "cost center". Modern "Management" does not like paying for "cost centers".
The rest is atmospherics.
(The US has, in general, taken a similar attitude towards public education, while simultaneously making it responsible for "everything" regarding children's upbringing. Compounding the problem.)
A lot of these HR departments are in serious need of an investigation. If they've really determined for themselves that nobody is good enough for this job I guarantee there is some kind of discrimination or fraud going on.
Pay them more. 120k is like 60k in mid 1990s money.
And, pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in what you need. That’s what defense contractors and mega corps do / have done.
Stop complaining and be stewards of your community. Like Henry Ford argued back in the day, “I want my employees to be able to buy a Ford”. Invest and the people will invest back.
We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math. Maybe what we used to do would be more palatable if we weren't pissing away money on dysfunctional public education.
Alternatively, we have decades of credentials inflation such that our high school graduates can indeed do math - but we choose to pretend they can’t and instead insist that an expensive undergraduate degree is required for entry level work.
First, that's UCSD, not UC Davis. They mention UC Davis in the report, but the 8.5% refers to UCSD.
Secondly, mastering high school math is genuinely difficult these days. I'm a math major, I've made it through my calc courses and differential equations, but I found Algebra 2 legitimately hard. Logarithms and Trigonometric functions are counterintuitive, and not everybody is at their peak ability to buckle down and grind through things when they're struggling at age 17.
And lastly, this is pretty obviously at least in part a knock-on affect of covid, hence the extremely recent major spike. I'm not sure it's worth generalizing from "UC San Diego Students admitted in the last couple of years are struggling with high school math (because they were in high school during lockdown)" to "We shouldn't try paying mechanics more because everyone's bad at math"
While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
So actually I was wrong. I should have said:
- 11.8% of UCSD freshmen haven't mastered high school math
- 8.5% haven't mastered middle school math
These folks may have had some disruption during the last year of middle school, and the first year of high school. But does that fully explain why they haven't mastered middle school math or, in some cases, elementary school math?
The comment to which I responded quibbled with mhb saying "We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math."
It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.
> It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily assume that 100% of anyone with a degree has mastered what the degree is for. So to me the takeaway is that ~90% have mastered the math. And so in terms of the original comment, not necessarily do we need them all to go to undergraduate.
You'd better duck before the people who "don't test well" come for you. There are millions of people out there who swear they know a ton of things and have great skills in math/science/whatever, but when asked to demonstrate them in any verifiable way (a "test") they freeze up and perform poorly. I don't really think those people are all lying (it's probably an anxiety disorder) but the entire notion of being able to empirically measure knowledge/skills/aptitude is controversial to some people.
It doesn't matter if bad testers exist. Presumably, the percentage of them is not increasing over time, so the drift can still be measured. And if they are increasing over time, then the drift is still measuring something.
There sure seem to be more. Enough that some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely, by those who allege they're unfair to that group. So those schools just admit based on the "homework grades" that are inflated by getting credit just for showing up and trying, success optional.
So IDK maybe there are more. Or maybe they are just louder now.
The suspension of SAT/ACT requirements was mostly a pandemic measure (and is being wound down) not something colleges were bullied into by people alleging unfairness (they are people alleging unfairness, they just aren't what got the policies implemented.)
> some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely
"Starting in Fall 2026, a growing list of high-profile universities will once again require standardized test scores for admission, including most of the Ivy League, Stanford, and Georgetown to name a few" [1].
> Enough that some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely, by those who allege they're unfair to that group. So those schools just admit based on the "homework grades" that are inflated by getting credit just for showing up and trying, success optional.
You drank the kool-aid. There was no bullying there. It was logistics.
In almost all cases, standardized test results were made optional. They were not “eliminated”.
Those who did not supply standardized test results, at least at any school that actually rejected people, had to provide a higher standard of proof of their abilities in their admissions materials.
I live in CA, and I know quite a few folks who glibly didn’t take or submit standardized test scores, and they absolutely did not get into schools that they were very academically qualified for (e.g., mid-tier UC schools like UCSD). These schools normally would have been safety schools for the given caliber of applicant.
Ivies made the SAT optional for a while, especially in 2020, but that was largely due to an access issue. I think they all require it now. And again, any person who didn’t have an SAT score and got admitted was almost certainly a strong admit anyway (super strong external academic validation, recruited athlete, etc.). I’m guessing precisely zero people sneaked into an Ivy by slyly not submitting a standardized test score while also being a marginal applicant.
A ton of high school graduates can't do basic math (which also explains their economic illiteracy, like believing that just taxing billionaires more would fix everything[1]).
And also at the same time, we demand college degrees for white-collar jobs that anyone who completed the alleged requirements to graduate high school could totally do. I think this stems from an outdated belief that college is difficult and challenging, and therefore getting through it proves you're exceptionally clever. A notion that has been a joke for at least 15 years if not 20.
So everything is fake. The diplomas are fake, the degrees are fake, and the job requirements are fake. All of it is being used to come up with legal and justifiable ways to pick the people with sufficient brain cells to be entrusted with job responsibilities.
[1] Most college graduates would likely get this question orders of magnitude wrong: If you could split the full net worth of the top 10 billionaires equally among every man, woman, and child in America how big would each one's check be? Correct answer: Just over $6,000. (Of course, we'll ignore how to deal with the market crash caused by forcing the sudden liquidation of their 2 trillion dollars in assets.)
Does going to college and learning say, compilers or differential equations not have value? Your employer won't teach you. Please don't tell me the heat equation is fake.
I think they're saying that learning compilers, differential equations, or the heat equation aren't actually that relevant for getting a mid-level procurement job or becoming the manager of a hotel.
Imagine trying to advance that the proposition of taxing billionaires is negatable on basic math. That's a critical thinking error, probably compounded by a lack of education in humanities and civilization not a basic math problem.
Tax them, don't tax them, I don't care. But you can't argue with the math that a one-time $6k or even $12k per person will not pay for the welfare state the DNC keeps promising us. Please, prove me wrong, show me the math of how you're going to take the billionaires' money (even discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens) and pay for free college for all, double pay for teachers, triple the minimum wage, give free houses to everyone who can't afford them now.
The point isn't whether they should pay a higher tax rate (probably they should!) -- it's whether it would be massively transformative to our society if/when we enacted that. I argue it is not. Pretending it is, is the Marxist fringe's version of the welfare queen or the illegal immigrant murderer that the right-wing people try to bamboozle their base with. We could eliminate all welfare fraud and all immigrant criminals by magic and it wouldn't make our society wildly better. It would be a small improvement.
taxing billionaires isn't just about redistributing their money. it's about changing the objective functions that motivate the ultrawealthy.
when they see diminishing returns for increasing their net worth, they might think "hey, maybe instead of using my immense resources to further enrich myself i should do... anything else"
> discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens
You're correct on the fact that taxing billionaires doesn't generate meaningful revenue. You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.
If one raised top tax rates in a revenue-neutral way, one would expect it to massively boost the economy and thus the stock market. You'd have unlocked more money for high-velocity spenders.
> You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.
It certainly would.
Where do you think those billionaires would get the money to pay the tax? It’s not like they have billions of dollars in cash somewhere; they’d sell assets. Those assets are predominately stock. Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets.
> Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets
...don't do this.
The combined net worth of America's billionaires is about $7tn. Let's assume half of that is in public stocks. That's $3.5tn. That's about what retail investors alone bought "in the first six months of 2025" [1].
Given the fundamentals of the companies wouldn't have changed, this would be a massive opportunity for institutional investors to deploy capital. (If you didn't do the tax in a revenue-neutral manner, you'd free up tonnes of capital from Treasury demand.)
One might expect a dip in companies where a single billionaire holds a large fraction of the float, e.g. Tesla, Amazon, et cetera. But broadly speaking, these aren't numbers which–even if compressed to a single year, which isn't how you'd pass such legislation–would cause a crash.
There are good arguments against super taxes. Crashing the stock market isn't one of them.
Well most talk of taxing billionaires involves capital gains taxes, not one time wealth taxes, and the serious lefties care more about nationalizing their assets than taxing them.
But yeah, the imaginary tax proposals invented in this thread may or may not work out, i wouldn't call anything about them "certain" though
Well most of the people you're strawmanning also support raising corporate taxes, and generally also on millionaires. I get that the imaginary blue haired nonbinary public school grad in your head exclusively uses the word "billionaire," though.
100K per family by my math. Don't know why you believe that only the top 10 billionaires have too much personal wealth.
Why does society need to create a increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives. The simple fact is that if the government didn't give these people billions in subsidies we would never have to hear them bloviate, Musk, Farely, all these rich A-Holes keeping America stuck in the local minima of car ownership would be utterly irrelevant.
The most dysfunctional aspects of public education have less to do with the education and more to do with the home lives of the children we are trying to educate.
In my town, most of the cost of education is just paying teachers. The school system is expensive because paying a lot of teachers is expensive, as is maintaining school buildings. And guess what? Teachers still don't make that much, especially because the union typically has to fight hard for the even basic cost-of-living raises, classroom materials are often not reimbursed by the school, and teachers have hours of unpaid non-overtime overtime work.
And the funny thing about the cost of living raises? The costs are going up because of things like housing, food, and energy for heating. Corporate profits are at generational highs and wealth inequality is growing. So teachers, just like the rest of us, are subject to greater and greater consumer surplus extraction, effectively sucking wealth out of the towns where they live and work. And then taxpayers in those towns need to keep paying for their raises, but those same taxpayers are subject to the same consumer surplus extraction.
Families with two working parents, families struggling to pay for rent and heat and food, families where everyone is addicted to social media... none of that is conducive to kids showing up and being ready to spend 8 hours learning stuff, not to mention drilling and retaining and developing an understanding of what they learned.
Everything is politics and everything is economics. Society is a deeply interconnected ecosystem. School is dysfunctional because families are dysfunctional, suffering from degradation of social structures and severe economic pressure. School is expensive teachers are expensive, and teachers are expensive because they are suffering from the same economic pressure as the families who send their kids to school.
Every household is a little capillary in a great circulatory system of money. Income goes in one end and spending goes out the other end. What's happening now is that most capillaries are receiving smaller and smaller shares of the total flow, while some special ones are swollen larger than we have ever seen before. When people say that the system is rigged, this is what they mean. Is it any surprise that the people with the power to change where the money flows are using that power to make sure more of it flows to themselves?
There are plenty of high school and college graduates that can do elementary school math. They are just going into more lucrative fields. If Ford wants those candidates, they need to offer more competitive salaries.
You're likely being underpaid. I'm in Iowa and regularly see software devs with offers higher than that. The last company I was at, they brought an intern back with a $140k starting salary. He was making more than an "architect" who had been at the company for 16 years.
I'm not in SV either and $120k would be well below average for someone with 30 years experience in my area. Of course, "in tech" can mean a lot of things. From what I have seen, tech writers and IT help desk folk don't make nearly as much as SW developers.
That sucks, i learned JavaScript during the pandemic and make more than 120k at a corporate gig in Chicago (where salaries are certainly higher than Wichita but it's no SV). I don't even have a college degree.
My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.
> Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know
It's worse. If they'd been held back earlier, they might have graduated high school prepared for the sorts of trades jobs this article discusses. Instead, they're processed through the system as a number. Best case, they aren't constantly disrupting their classrooms.
Again, from my personal experience of having kids in school, they do hold kids back in elementary and even middle school, but less so in high school. From what I have seen, they will strongly recommend it if they feel that a student is not ready for the next grade, but won't force it if the parents disagree. There’s not a whole lot else they can do. There’s no other place in society to support these kids at the bottom and the schools aren’t funded well enough to give them the one on one attention to catch them up.
> what happens to GPA if a kid is failed/held back a year?
For a kid who is held back a year, what good is any GPA? Genuine question.
I’m sure that one could construct some sort of edge case or corner case in which a college-bound kid has a bad year. That said, for each of those cases, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a perfectly good way for that person to find a reasonable path to a very good university.
That said, in most cases, the folks who are held back will have significant issues that will marginalize them anyway: social, psychological, cognitive, etc.
i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.
> i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.
This happens.
Usually they will not get held back. Usually the teachers will know what’s going on. A passing C (or even B) can be manufactured in these spots. This assumes that they are normally good students.
Also note that most schools that reject people have a spot on their application where an applicant can explain any sort of extenuating circumstances (e.g., parents divorce, etc.), and a bad year will be overlooked as long as it’s clear that they are back on track and can perform.
If someone has consistent performance issues and just happens to be smart, then they need to fix the performance issues. This is usually best done at a junior college and then a transfer to a four-year school (e.g., State U).
There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along.
This is literally my point. What difference does it make if I heard it online
Is that better or worse than having them drop out?
it is worse given that it gives false signals for the job market and devalues the credential
My wife was a Title
I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
Ahh, yes the key to mathematics being an issue is public education. We should privatize it so that half the population goes from under educated to completely uneducated.
Or maybe we could go with the coal town model and have children accrue debt to a major corporation that they can literally never pay off in exchange for an education!
I literally did not literally propose privatizing in these comments. Here all I said was that public schools are dysfunctional if they are producing high school and college graduates who can't do elementary school math.
The solution to that dysfunction was outside the scope of this discussion. Literally.
So literally privatizing schools. Because vouchers will simply cause public schools to collapse while allowing private schools to pick and choose who to educate. I can guarantee you they won’t be accepting the students with low math scores who have absentee parents that treat school like a daycare.
Let me guess: if we just ignore the scores of those problem children who no longer have access to education, the math scores will look better?
So that's the argument you want to have and you're not going to be happy until you have it? How about this? Assume that it's more important for your interlocutors to improve education than it is for them to win a debate. Assume that they would like everyone to get a great education.
Presumably, we agree that public schools, in general, are not, currently doing a great job. I'm also assuming that, for some reason, they used to do a significantly better job.
I don't know what the point would be of recapitulating Friedman's arguments for school choice and vouchers in these comments. He's much smarter and a better writer than anyone you're likely to find here. If you've read them and made up your mind, a handful of HN comments are not going to sway you. If you haven't read them you should.
Another thing I’ve heard is that Ford is terrible at designing maintainable cars and mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something. It was akin to replacing the gasket requires them to pick the engine apart and rebuild it, while Ford only pays them for an hour of labor. I can’t find the exact video at the moment but the reality is that even if Ford paid $120k, you’d probably be working 80 hours a week.
>mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something
I believe this is mainly for warranty or recall work. If it's out of warranty, then the charges can be much higher. It also depends on the difficulty of the work being done. I had my Mustangs rear diff seal replaced under warranty, and I guarantee you that doing that wasn't that bad in terms of pay or time taken.
And you shouldn't be being paid fake rates. You should be being paid *at least* your worked hours. Playing otherwise is, I would argue, theft. So 40 hours a week plus whatever overtime you would earn.
It sounds like this is the actual problem and instead of paying exorbitant salaries or fixing the entire US education system Ford just needs to face reality and accept how long repairs actually take and pay for that time. That and/or redesign their cars to take less time to repair.
I agree with your statement, for the most part. Investing in community college programs is one route since they are essentially a business. The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees. Essentially, the graduates don't have marketable skills. The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability."
Another way to go is adult and high school education, i.e. the old auto shop classes that are currently very hard to find. This goes for any other trade, such as Drafting, Welding, as well not just auto shop.
So, yea, companies should pay more and invest in education, rather than bitch and complain about the lack of fully train workers.
Community Colleges being considered corrupt is not an accusation I’ve heard. Is there something behind this or are you grouping them with the issues seen with Public Universities and grants/loans fueling spiraling tuition?
The Community College I went to was about $20 per unit and offered a great education. Currently they’re $46 per unit. The instructors worked in the industry and were sharper than my 200 level University course
instructors I paid $100 per unit for the year after my Associates Degree. I went to University as the Great Recession happened and had to go back to Community College as financial markets melted (and some life events happened) and that Associates Degree and an additional quarter of a Bachelors has served me well. I got my first job in software through a Community College affiliated internship, hopped to a Startup, and after a lot of years in between I’m on here musing with the rest of the industry.
There are certainly “Extension”
or non Trades “Certificate Only” programs but when looking at LinkedIn’s Alumni view they’ve minted a lot of Solar Techs, Electricians, and Building Engineers. I took Electronics courses as an elective with the PV guys and it was a lot of fun and seems rather profitable for that cohort.
Ergo, I’m genuinely curious to know if this has been derailed in some way at large. Do you have any links to news on this?
As I am no longer in the business of higher ed, I do not have any links but do have work experience at the CC level as well as an Associate, though no BS. The reason you don't see accusations is because it is kept on the downlow by the powers that be. I can say that in the time that I spent working at a particular CC, multiple CC presidents were kicked out for diverting funds into their private bank accounts. They were hired even after it was known that they got kicked out of other previous CCs. Millions of dollars in Financian Aid fraud was an issue in one state, in particular by fake Ghost Students enrolling only for the Financial Aid. Here's a link to that story: https://www.opencampus.org/2025/06/16/financial-aid-fraud-is...
The administrators tend to be overpaid, half of the degrees that are offered are useless, mine included. Why are they useless, because there will never be sufficient employment for the graduates. Even knowing this economic reality, the college admins still insist on having the main goal as "graduation," not "employability."
In my view, only auto, nursing, medical subjects and other practical trades guarantee employment, and thus are worth the $46 per unit as you put it. Please note that at one time, CCs were free, in the state that I reside in, though I myself went to school when the cost was $15 per unit.
You should check out this link to take a look at the outrageous salaries that a lot of administrators generate: https://transparentcalifornia.com/ The problem with this is that the various student department and programs get a disproportionate allocation of the funds, with some getting the bulk, and others getting just a tiny slice of the budget that the office of education provides.
Here's a simple example of the news that never gets carried by mainstream media.
In last November 2024 Election, in California, for example, there were various measures which passed, that forced communities to pay taxes to pay for Community College expansions and repairs. People don't realize that in one school in particular the same thing was done some years or so before, and the money was mysteriously mishandled. This is a common occurrence in that state, for example. http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/ballot-argument-referral...
This has been the status quo prior to Trump. The federal funds have had a tendency to disappear. I noticed you used LinkedIn as a reference above, but it has its own issues with Fraud, aka Ghost Jobs posts and fake scammers offering users jobs that don't exist. I myself got approached by one and reported it LinkedIn support. In my view, LinkedIn is just another scam site that posts fake jobs just to lure people into purchasing their Pro subscription. I get that message and reminder every single day, so I disabled most notifications and don't use LinkedIn as a job search engine, anymore.
Apologies, way too long of a response and I need to have some Soylent Green.
> Investing in community college programs is one route since they are essentially a business.
A 501c3 nonprofit with pretty stringent requirements (accreditation, reporting, transparency), but yes a business nonetheless.
> The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by corrupt, and issuing students worthless degrees? Graduates from the program I direct at a community college are generally earning 120-160k in IT around 2 years after graduation.
> The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability."
Universities yes, community colleges I would not consider this an accurate statement. At my community college our CTE programs (job training) are explicitly evaluated on student salaries as well as how many are actually employed in the industry after graduation, usually within 18-36 months time. It's actually two of the few metrics that are considered "high value", as in 2x the other value of other metrics like graduation, enrollment, retention, revenue-per-student, etc.
I was actually referring to full universities. The university I went to was a feeding school for local defense contractors and major conglomerates. I am quite certain that the universities in Redmond are assisted by Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, as well.
> pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in what you need
I get that we're still pretending EVs don't exist in America. But could the dearth of internal combustion mechanics be explained as an obselescence rent [1]?
“We can’t possibly afford to do this. It doesn’t make sense! What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?”
“What if you don’t and they stay?”
These companies think they can just reap all of the rewards without any investment, it’s stupid. I definitely agree with you saying that there needs to be a return to these places taking more care and investing in long-term people. Like you said, invest in them and they’ll invest in you.
I did the math in my head based on something I saw someone else share earlier today; but I was probably a bit off. Putting in 120k on this website for this year turns into about 58k in 1995
> Propping up the good old boys network by overpaying for executive talent is of negative utility to the shareholders
We don't really have evidence executives are overpaid. The fact that even cheapskate private company owners wind up paying their executives well should communicate something about what's going on.
There is a boatload of evidence. It's been studied repeatedly.
Most of it shows that there is a small but real link between CEO pay and stock performance. This works best when CEO pay is tied directly to performance, and it isn't tied to the specific dollar value just the percentage of increase. IE - The $40m CEO doesn't actually outperform the $20m CEO, but a CEO who oversees a big jump in profits will see a big raise regardless of the reason.
CEO pay DOES correlate strongly with luck. IE - They get rewarded with big bonuses when the larger market does well or taxes go down, and they don't tend to get smaller pay when the market does poorly.
The SEC requires companies to disclose the executive pay to median salary.
It 2023 it was 312:1.
Ok, but $500 000/year isnt a median salary. But Ford's CEO is $26.4 million, so 53:1.
Gather up the rest of the C-suit at Ford and you got a couple hundred mechanics.
Do that to Stellantis and GM and you're at about 500 mechanics. 10 per state is not an insignificant number of high paid mechanics.
Add Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, GE, and all the other once great industrial American jewels run by idiots and you have financed the training of a large portion of the American workforce.
$20 million if the CEO’s pay is in stock not cash. Unless you want to pay mechanics in stock instead of salary there isn’t nearly enough cash saved to pay mechanics $500k.
Except, now those companies have no leadership at all so just tell the workers to just do whatever seems like a good idea and hope for the best?
Why haven't we seen a bunch of successful companies without any management if management is so useless/harmful? Just ICs self-organizing to run the whole business. Without any execs to pay they'd have a cost advantage running that way.
Oh, yeah, because those companies have really proven that their leadership is so incredibly valuable.
The problem with evaluating leadership is we almost always talk in terms of impact ("this decision saved/made/lost the company $X million/billion per year") as opposed to performance over replacement ("compared to an average person we could have hired to fulfill this role, how'd you do?"). The nature of a capitalist system is that large piles of money tend to get bigger, and companies are giant piles of money. If you are in a position of power, on average you're going to make the company more money. That doesn't make you exceptionally valuable, as pretty much anyone we could have put in that slot was going to make money.
Talent here is very often having friends on the board, through common investments and co-ownership of those private jet/ luxury yacht/luxury hostel rentals that operates 'at a loss' (you only pay consumption taxes on your direct spending, if the company rent you the plane for the cost of kerosene, and you pay yearly through your holdings for fixed costs, you avoid a lot of taxes. Tips from a friend who works at one of those places).
That network of insiders colluding behind the scenes are NOT providing optimal results for the shareholders, or for the market in general. They are instead optimizing their own short term gains at the expense of everyone else.
A bunch of good old boys making handshake deals with their buddies aren't actually choosing the best products and services for the best price, and the companies they helm will eventually suffer for it as the entire market does each time it happens.
Say we pay them 1 million dollars instead of (googled) 25 million dollars.
If we increase the compensation by another 60 thousand dollars a year that gives us room for 400 additional mechanics.
The stock price of Ford might even go up if you could improve the repair situation.
total compensation for Ford CEO is 24.9 million. But obviously it doesn't need to work that it is just taken from his money.
I propose that if the money for mechanics is needed, it can be gotten by redirecting capital from other parts of the system to invest in mechanics, funny that math is the subject here because this redirecting of capital could even be thought of a mathematical process, although really more a number of related processes together, I shall call these processes that control how money will be moved to handle problems in the systems that exist to generate more money "Capitalism".
In the rest of my work I shall discuss how the processes that control circulation of money will lead to its accumulation and conversion to power among a subset of power, allowing them to over time amass more and more power, I will note the problems this will imply but not really offer a solution as my primary interest is in describing the ways that need for a thing will cause the investment in that thing to rise over time, and decrease thereby investment in other things, as though the whole were an impartial and, as noted, nearly mathematical process in its elegance.
Your implied theory only applies to actual free market capitalism.
Most/many CEO's don't get the gig thanks to an efficient market or being the best. There are others equally or better qualified who would do the job for much less.
The typical justification for their high salaries is that it encourages the rest of the executives to buck harder for the role. In practice, far less pay could achieve that goal.
your inferred theory does not seem to match up with the things I was implying, for example you seem to think I was saying something about the Ford CEO deserving the money they make in some way?
So are you out of touch with CEO comp packages, or are you also bad at math? (In case you or someone else needs to hear it, ain't no CEO ain't gonna fuck ya for defending CEO's excessive compensation in the Hacker News comments. What a weird thing to do.)
30,000,000 / 30,000. Hope you can find a calculator to help you with that challenging math. I know it gets hard with such big numbers! (kinda the point, here!)
I would like to expand and add a little nuance to my statement as apparently it was controversial.
From wikipedia:
> Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."
So a business is an activity or enterprise engaged in by people for profit.
If a business exists to generate profit for its participants, it should maximize profit distribution to everyone involved in that business. This implies salary limits that maintain business sustainability. Otherwise, excessive compensation would eliminate profit for all participants.
My point wasn't about how to balance salaries between different employees. I'm arguing that companies should maximize compensation for all employees (at every level) to the extent that doing so doesn't threaten the business's viability. Without this, you get companies hoarding excessive capital reserves that sit idle rather than circulating through the economy.
And if that’s too little, the company should go under and make room for a company with the cash flow to pay people a salary high enough to accept the job offer.
You raise a valid point that doesn't deserve the downvoting...
But have you considered it fully? We're in a heap of shit if the pay that employers can truly afford is lower than the pay that employees require to earn the minimal livelihood. If there is really realsy no overlap there, then you need to stock up on canned food and shotgun shells.
Because it takes a lot more education to work at a modern factory than what it took in 1930.
The rest of the world has kept up. Even if you could hypothetically cram 12 years of education into six months of training, the kind of mental effort required to go through that training would be quite impossible for the average person.
But why do that when it’s so much easier to blame AI or immigration, or whatever the new boogeyman of the day is.
>Farley complained that "we don't have trade schools anymore," reports Avi Zilber in the New York Post.
Who, exactly, is this "we"? Capitalists talk up The Market, but are unwilling to pay market-driven wages and salaries, and expect others, usually the government, to foot the bill for training their skilled workers.
It would also help if Ford and other vehicle manufacturers put some thought into incorporating maintainability into their designs. Their newest offerings are a hot mess in this respect.
Is this some obscure hint that there will be well paid skilled jobs to replace those taken away by AI?
I'm sure I've previously heard it implied that all the grooms who lost their jobs to motor cars became mechanics and chauffeurs. Surely this would be just too poetic.
Go ahead and look up the pay for mechanics in Michigan, he is spewing pure bullshit. Most mechanics here have never in their life made $100k in a year, even with considerable overtime.
I saw the management my parents and grandparents had to deal with. I saw the hours they worked. I saw how little they were appreciated. I saw how companies screwed over people who had worked for decades.
They haven’t changed one bit.
They’re lying about how much they’re paying people. That’s a maximum you can earn working 70 hours per week, not the base.
I am completely unsurprised they can’t find anybody to work for them.
As an old, I feel for the author. Her bio suggests she is or was sympathetic to the working class, but she done got old and moved to Silicon Valley so I wonder.
“The Ford CEO's grandfather was one of the company's early employees, hired to work on the Model T.”
Yeah, and one of my grandfathers was a cop and the other a foreman on a jewelry shop floor. Both of which have as much to do with my coding career as the square root of sweet Fanny Adams. My dad put himself through college by working in a garage. I will admit the math in the 50s or so was more rigorous than what I had in the 80s, but the idea anyone interested in working on cars can’t be taught from almost scratch seems like a strong take. Whether you paid attention in pre-algebra or not is going to have little to do with your ability to balance four tires as a system or clean a carb or set engine timing via a computer.
The first comment on the website says that $120K is a lie.
Then of course, why would you specialize in the F150 if they add new electronic BS every 2 years, the car will perhaps be obsolete in 7 years or all tariffs on BYD are lifted in 8 years.
Maybe keep cars general and don't make them proprietary, then people will learn general skills.
Ford needs to step up, if it can’t find mechanics.
Pay is too low for entry level people, at maybe $14 an hour. That’s before the Snap-on Truck comes by and saddles that tech with $40k of debt.
Give entry level workers a living wage, and give them tools to use (and keep after investing 3 years in the business). Have an actual pipeline for certification and training and remove the gate keeping of many dealers that prevent good techs from becoming better mechanics. Do better at engineering vehicles so they are easier to work on.
As this CEO knows, doing the right thing is harder than complaining.
Ford spending $4 million to fund scholarships is going to make as much change to the system as me giving a homeless person a quarter. Considering how expensive college is, what exactly will that fund.
I encourage you to Google it rather than speculate, as this information is readily available.
> This year's program… is offering $5,000 scholarships to 800 potential automotive technicians from across the country. This year, the program is available across 42 states and for students attending nearly 600 schools. In addition to tuition assistance, scholarship funds can be used to cover day-to-day related expenses like living and transportation, childcare, and tools needed for class and more.
Whether you believe all of that scholarship money will actually be given out is another question.
I don't doubt they will give it out, it's just it doesn't state that is the total cost of the program to become a technician. When college for many costs up to and beyond $100,000, providing just 5% of the cost, is hardly worth shouting about. It definitely isn't a big enough gesture for a company that had revenue of $185 billion in 2024. I am sensing they could find a touch more to actually pay for workers to become technicians for their company, that would benefit them. They could even set up their own program/apprenticeship.
Most of them are community colleges and trade schools that charge around $10k - $30k total for the degree. In which case, an additional $5k in scholarships is nice.
If you want to be mad at a big company, this probably isn’t your strongest leg to stand on, and there are plenty of other targets for you to be mad at.
That doesn't include food, living costs, general life expenses. That makes it closer to $100,000. I stand by what I said $5000 and stating it can be spent on tuition or living costs is not really going to make a dent in the decision to go to college or trade school.
What facts have you provided that I have ignored? You stated that a community college degree costs between $10,000 to $30,000 over the course of length from starting to qualifying. Therefore it covers approx 1/2 to 1/6 of that. However living costs (which you have failed to mention), which I would say depending (on research done when I considered a post grad in the US) on where you are will approx be $1500 to 3000. Now I read it can take 2 to 4 years depending on if you want an associates degree or a bachelors. Therefore living costs for 2 years can be from $36,000 to $72,000, and for 4 years $72,000 to $144,000. I do not understand why you are choosing to ignore the numbers. It seems a completely bias interpretation of the facts.
Not sure why this is downvoted. It doesn’t even qualify as a rounding error. There are individuals that spend more than this sending other peoples kids to college.
People on here surprise me sometimes with what they down vote. $4 million dollars is 0.00002162% of the total revenue Ford US had in 2024. When you put that little value on future employees and skills, it is clear why you have such a struggle finding competent staff.
"Servicing an electric vehicle requires interpreting data flows, troubleshooting electronics, and following precise, multistep instructions." It's not a job for "grease monkeys."
Community College professor here, in the midst of leaving my community college for a full university.
Let me dissect this article with uncompromising scrutiny:
> "...have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”
Maybe because for 30 years America sold the idea that you need a bachelors degree to do the majority of these jobs, while simultaneously implying that you only needed 2 years of vocational school? A lot of these require extensive apprenticeships and experience (576 classroom hours, 8,000 experience hours, passing exams for a journeyman electrician license in Oregon). It's absolutely not "Go to school for 2 years and get paid $120k."
Furthermore, most of the trades are brutal on your body, mind, and lifestyle.
> "we don't have trade schools anymore"
We do, and we do our best to train students on only the absolute necessary skills that get them the job and working as quickly as possible. Corporations stopped meaningfully supporting them while simultaneously raising expectations. Major companies stopped most training and orientation programs or significantly scaled them back, passed the burden of training onto community colleges and trade schools, and now complain that our tools and techniques are out of date.
Ford does at my college this while keeping their name slapped on the auto mechanic's program because they helped start the program 20 years ago. Now they're upset because they're not getting the same returns while my fellow instructors struggle to teach on supplies that are 2 decades old.
> "What we don't have are enough young people with the literacy and math proficiency needed to learn skilled trades."
A lot of the K-12 complaint is the No Child Left Behind act and the effects of Common Core. Lots of throwing up of hands here saying "Well guess there's nothing we can do. We have all these high paying jobs that no one wants"
Wanna fix this? Eliminate No Child Left Behind. Actually invest in teachers, tutors, and the people making the impact. Stop calling teachers 'heroes', and give us the resources to actually instruct kids. Stop assuming a household with 2-3 kids, 2 parents that work full time (overtime in today's America), are barely making ends meet, and have no extended family to help kids with homework or tutor, are going to somehow do extremely well.
In fact, we have loads of papers that demonstrate that math scores and grades are pretty tightly correlated with parents'/family ability and availability to help kids with homework. Maybe have parents work less so they can tutor their kids more?
> "Workers who struggle to read grade-level text cannot read complicated technical manuals or diagnostic instructions."
They don't have trouble reading grade-level text. This is a complete misunderstanding of what those tests evaluate. More importantly: If they're struggling to read those complicated manuals or diagnostic instructions, maybe it's because most manufacturers eliminated a lot of the repairability of cars in the past few decades and scaled back their service manuals? Maybe invest in technical writing again?
> They were passed on with inflated grades
Because you stopped hiring anyone with less than a 3.0-4.0. If a teacher's job is to get a student a job in the trades, you won't hire them because their GPA is poor, and we get fired if too many students fail, guess what we (instructors) are going to do?
> "If they can’t handle middle-school math they can’t program high-tech machines or robotics, or operate the automated equipment found in modern factories and repair shops."
Also not correct, and a gross misinterpretation of what the national exams show. Most students can do most math with a calculator just fine, mental math not so much, but it's rare to be in a shop without some kind of computer or calculator nowadays. If you want people who have completed a 2 year trade program to be able to competently do calculus, robotics, PLCs, and program, you need to admit that the job requires far beyond 'middle-school math'.
> ""Servicing an electric vehicle requires interpreting data flows, troubleshooting electronics, and following precise, multistep instructions." It's not a job for "grease monkeys."
Here is the crux of the problem. All of these are needs that are way beyond a standard mechanical technician's toolkit. You need them to dual train as electrical engineers and mechanical engineers with notable expertise in 12/24v and rather high voltages for EVs. You don't want 'average technicians' for 120k, you want dual-degree mechanical and electrical engineers to work for you for less than their going market rate. If your toolchain requires more than an understanding of ODB2 (or 1-2 device) readings and a solid understanding of vehicular operations and what commonly breaks, then you've spent too much time making your products unrepairable and obtuse.
A trucker (CDL) is the only one without extremely high apprenticeship requirements.
From there, who thought that you'd need a bachelors to be a barista and pour coffee? It's not just about the raw requirements, but about the competition you face in the job market.
Finally, more and more field service technician and electrician, HVAC, roles that are traditionally GED/2-years only, have extremely high experience requirements, and most are preferring people pursuing or with a bachelors in electrical engineering (electrician, HVAC), mechanical/fluid engineering (plumbing), or similar. Earlier this year I was in a remote-ish location (about 100 miles from a major city) and we had an electrical fault that legally required a licensed electrician to repair. We had multiple electrical engineers offer to help who clearly knew the problem and how to fix it according to code, but we couldn't let them touch it because they didn't have their J or better.
If you want to risk no degree and go for your 8,000 hours to get licensed (roughly 4 years experience for no/mediocre pay), go for it.
> who thought that you'd need a bachelors to be a barista and pour coffee?
"About one-fifth of underemployed recent college graduates—roughly 9 percent of all recent graduates—were working in a low-skilled service job" between 2009 and 2013 [1]. Two fifths of baristas have college degrees [2].
If the auto mechanics were paid a salary of $120K per year for 40 hours per week, they'd be flooded with applicants.
Instead, that $120K number is if you can work the requisite number of overtime hours and you don't pay attention to having to buy your own tools and ...
Do mechanics prefer to work with their own tools, or is this like a restaurant getting away with paying a tipped employee less than minimum wage because they can?
Generally the rule is you buy your own tools and then take them with you if you leave the shop.
Lots of mechanics prefer owning their own tools because the community shop tools will end up beat up and not cared for. Plus, another thing locking you down to the location. On the other hand that's yet another personal expense.
> Do mechanics prefer to work with their own tools, or is this like a restaurant getting away with paying a tipped employee less than minimum wage because they can?
Part from Column A and part from Column B.
It's also part of the accounting gimmicks to keep mechanics as "contractors" rather than "employees".
20% of highschool graduates know calculus but we can't get our shit together to hire any of them. We really need H-1Bs to work on oversized RC cars the skills are just too difficult for home grown plants.
Up until about 2 years ago, the kids taking calculus were all becoming SW engineers for 3x the pay. With the way the job market for entry-level engineers is trending lately, maybe now there will be some left over for Ford to hire.
Invest in candidates who will be ruthless about funding education and increasing the top marginal tax rate.
What's that? I'm hearing this guy doesn't want to pay taxes?
Many US State Colleges were supported by tax dollars and in the 90s, tax cuts started happening and funding for public colleges declined and fees started being added.
When I went to College, it was extremely cheep, books cost more than my tuition and fees. The state where I was had huge discounts for residents and since the college was in the City I was born and grew up in, I got even more discounts.
Now, kids need to take out big loans for higher education.
I will not go into cuts to public schools, these days, if parents can afford it, they send their kids to private school. When I was in school, the public schools were great, but they started to go down hill not long after I graduated High School.
The US spends a huge amount of money on education though. The root cause can’t be a lack of resources due to insufficient tax revenue, there’s no evidence of that.
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