Posts tagged manual labor
Ford workers told their CEO ‘none of the young people want to work here.’ So Jim Farley took a page out of the founder’s playbook
November 30, 2025 // “He said, ‘I’m doing this because I want my factory worker to buy my cars. If they make enough money, they’ll buy my own product,’” Farley said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.”
Ford CEO says he has 5,000 open mechanic jobs with 6-figure salaries from the shortage of manually skilled workers: ‘We are in trouble in our country’
November 13, 2025 // 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.
UPS to shut down three major facilities slashing 20,000 jobs
May 11, 2025 // This reconfiguration is set to modernize distribution centers nationwide with increased automation, leading to the closure of about 200 facilities. A UPS spokesperson shared that the initiative kicked off within the first months of 2025.
Proposed federal pay adjustment could boost wages for thousands of blue-collar feds
October 9, 2024 // Geographically, based on the proposal, OPM’s regulations would give federal pay increases mainly to FWS employees working in Alabama, California, Maine, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In particular, the proposed regulations would most prominently impact federal employees working at three major military installations: Tobyhanna, Letterkenny and Anniston Army Depots. The challenges leading to the persistent federal pay disparities are two-fold. In some cases, there are differences between blue-collar FWS employees and white-collar GS employees. In other cases, there are pay disparities among FWS employees working within the same wage area, OPM explained.