Earlier this year at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Conference, Ford CEO Jim Farley touched on quite a few subjects, including the fact that America is lacking in the area of skilled trades workers. Amid a shortage of automotive technicians, The Blue Oval has invested heavily in trade-school scholarships, technician boot camps, and educational programs, working to rectify this problem “because the future of our economy depends on it,” according to Farley. Now, the executive is set to continue those efforts in a new way.
Farley will meet with a group of leaders at the upcoming Ford Pro Accelerate event at the end of September at Michigan Central Station to discuss potential solutions to issues including labor shortages and declining productivity. The essential economy, as it’s known, is made up of 95 million workers in the U.S. across three million businesses in sectors such as service, energy, logistics, construction, and manufacturing, all of which play a key role in building and maintaining the overall economy.
“We will need to summon all the best ideas and to convene the disrupters and innovators – and set them to work on solving problems too often overlooked but that persist right under our noses,” Farley said. “Doing so isn’t just a smart investment for America’s future, it’s absolutely essential.”
According to research from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, productivity in the information sector grew by 5.3 percent annually between 2015-2024, while essential industries declined in virtually every regard. It found that if productivity in the essential economy had kept pace with its prior 20 years of growth, gross domestic product (GDP) in the U.S. would be around 10 percent higher, too. These issues are being further complicated by things like complex regulations and a generational decline in available skilled labor as well.
“The Aspen Institute is proud to partner with Ford on Accelerate. This important series of conversations on the Essential Economy will convene leaders from business, government, and civil society, responding to the call to action issued by Jim Farley at the Aspen Ideas Festival this summer,” said Dan Porterfield, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. “Through our programming, we share Ford’s commitment to bringing people together across generations, geographies, and viewpoints to explore what it takes to build an economy that embraces innovation and where essential industries can thrive.”
Special lease deals offered on luxury redesigned full-size SUV.
A recall was issued just this past June addressing the problem.
With more than 600 miles of total range.
Premature wear is the culprit, causing vibrations from the front.
Nothing will be built there until 2027, however.
Following two years of ranking below the mean.
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Farley should concentrate on cleaning up the mess he made at Ford instead of these extracurricular activities.
Altec has an assembly plant for those bucket trucks less than a mile from my house. They generally keep several hundred Ford chassis trucks in inventory at all times, as they are extremely busy (and have been for years since locating to Elizabethtown).
Farley is climbing a tree to catch a fish.
Of course Farley is right.
Where is Elizabethtown?