Ford CEO Takes Personal Credit For United Auto Workers Union Forcing Him To Raise Wages

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Jul 05, 2025

Ford CEO Jim Farley decided to rewrite history this past Friday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, telling the Elon Musk/Henry Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson that he — like Henry Ford before him — raised wages for his workers out of the kindness of his heart after speaking with them personally.

By pure coincidence, surely, this just so happened to occur during union negotiations, when he was visiting factories.

“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.

Farley explained to Isaacson that he learned that many of them were barely getting any sleep because they were also working at Amazon, and his heart just went out to them. So he decided to make temporary workers permanent workers, which gave them better wages, benefits, and profit sharing.

What a mensch!

Except the thing is … that is not remotely how that went at all. Rather, a pathway from temporary to permanent worker status was a concession won by United Auto Workers during contract negotiations in 2019 — which were highly influenced by the fact that UAW decided to strike at GM and made it clear to the big three that it wouldn’t end there if they didn’t come to the table with something acceptable.

The negotiation in 2023 following UAW’s stand up strike increased wages further for workers (25 percent across the board, which is extra impressive when you consider that wages had only increased 23 percent from 2002-2022), but by 150 percent for said temporary workers. That contract also put an end to “wage tiers” in which workers who had been grandfathered in under better union contracts had better pay and benefits than newer workers. Which, you know, was probably another reason younger workers were not so keen on working there.

Later in the interview, someone in the audience actually asked Farley why, if he felt so strongly about workers having better wages, it took one of the largest strikes in history for them to get that.

Farley’s response? He didn’t think the strike was necessary and didn’t understand it, and even claimed that they were even more motivated than the UAW was to give workers a great contract … which does not seem like a thing that is even remotely true.

During the interview, Farley talked a whole lot about how America needs to bring back manufacturing and parents need to encourage their kids to go to vocational schools over four-year colleges, because AI will do all of the white collar jobs.

However, in 2024, Farley actually threatened to move production overseas all because the 2023 strike just really hurt his feelings. Guess he wasn’t built Ford tough after all.

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There is nothing wrong with going to vocational school and pursuing a trade, of course, but it’s hard to trust how long those jobs will be there for you when CEOs are so blasé about ripping the rug out from under you.

On some level, we’d all rather have a douchey CEO taking credit for something a union did and treating his workers fairly and decently. On another, it’s also important for people to understand that this is what happens when you unionize instead of hoping that a benevolent boss smiles down on you and raises your wages because he feels bad about your sleep schedule.

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