Why Ford Can’t Find Mechanics
Forget about reshoring manufacturing without more skilled workers.
The Wall Street Journal Nov. 17, 2025
Corporate CEOs are keeping their heads down these days, lest they get chopped off by the Trump Administration. So last week’s remarks by Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley deserve credit for candor, as well as for the public service of telling politicians a hard truth about the American labor force.
Mr. Farley told a podcast last week that he can’t find enough skilled mechanics to run his auto plants. Specifically, Ford can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 a year.
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Mr. Farley said. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.” He said Ford is struggling to hire mechanics at salaries that Ivy League grads might envy.
“A bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it—are you kidding me? Nope,” Mr. Farley lamented. “We do not have trade schools” in this country. He’s right to a large degree. Few high schools teach trades these days. Community colleges are mostly remedial high school education, and government worker-training programs have poor results.
Government subsidies for college and graduate education have encouraged the young to go to college even though they might be better off learning a trade. This has created a skills mismatch in the labor market. Unemployment among young college grads is increasing, while employers struggle to hire skilled manufacturing workers, technicians and contractors.
Only 114,000 Americans in their 20s completed vocational programs during the first 10 months of last year, compared to 1.24 million who graduated from four-year colleges and 405,000 who received advanced degrees. Yet recent bachelor’s recipients in their 20s were 5.6 percentage points less likely to be employed than those who finished vocational programs.
The National Federation of Independent Business reported this month that one third of small business owners reported jobs they couldn’t fill, and 49% reported few or no qualified applicants for positions they were trying to fill. Twenty-seven percent cited labor quality as their most important problem.
If companies can’t find skilled workers in the U.S. and aren’t allowed to import them legally from overseas, they will move production offshore to the extent they can. But an American whose F-150 truck breaks down will still have to pay more at the repair shop owing to the mechanic shortage.
The GOP tax bill’s modest reforms to student loans might reduce the incentive for young people to pursue unpromising graduate degrees. But the government bias steering every high school student toward college is doing tangible harm to the labor market—and the young.
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Appeared in the November 18, 2025, print edition as 'Why Ford Can’t Find Mechanics'.